Race Has Little Effect on People’s Ability to Spot Family Resemblances

In the study recently published in the Journal of Vision (“Cross-cultural perceptions of facial resemblance between kin”), French and Senegalese participants were asked to match photos of parents with photos of their children.

Both groups were able to detect kinship with the same rate of success, whether they were looking at French parents and children or Senegalese parents and children. The amount of exposure — i.e., how much or how little contact participants had with members of the other race — had no affect on the participants’ ability to correctly match parents with their children.

The researchers, who are affiliated with France’s University of Montpelier and Japan’s Nagoya Institute of Technology and Okinawa University, explained that “the importance of exposure for recognizing faces is … supported by a large number of studies showing an “other-race effect,” which is defined as a greater capacity to recognize faces of one's own cultural group as compared to faces from other cultural groups.”

Lead investigator Alexandra Alvergne said: “Our results suggest that exposure has a limited role in the ability to process facial resemblance in others, which contrasts with the way our brains process facial recognition.” Her team concluded that facial recognition and the detection of facial resemblance are probably not processed in the same way.

The researchers believe their findings will be instrumental in other studies. “Brain-imagery studies could investigate whether processing facial resemblance among others is a by-product of the processing of facial resemblance to oneself. It would also be very interesting to explore whether other close-related species share this ability and whether it is linked to any reproductive benefit,” Alvergne said.

The Journal of Vision is an online-only, peer-reviewed, open-access publication devoted to visual function in humans and animals. It is published by the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. It explores topics such as spatial vision, perception, low vision, color vision and more, spanning the fields of neuroscience, psychology and psychophysics. JOV is known for hands-on datasets and models that users can manipulate online.

The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) is the largest eye and vision research organization in the world. Members include more than 12,500 eye and vision researchers from over 80 countries. The Association encourages and assists research, training, publication and knowledge-sharing in vision and ophthalmology.