Two faces of the same coin

Ever happened to you that you couldnt easily distinguish faces easily ? Especially when the faces are from another culture other than yours ? Or to put in another way around, you can more easily distinguish faces from the people with the same cultural background as you are ? Turns out that this is a psychological topic called Own-Race bias. Johanna Stahl, SF from FSU introduced this topic to some of us today.

She's working on her Ph.D on this topic, so she knows her stuff well :) and it was very interesting. Well, its got something to do with our inherent ability to more easily distinguish faces from our own race or ethinicity as opposed to other races. Johanna showed us a study that she has done where she asked people to look at different Asian and Caucasian faces and see how many of them they can recall after a while. The subjects were all Caucasian and it turns out that those who had no exposure to Asians could not recall the Asian faces very well, but could get most of the Caucasian faces. Those of whom had exposure to Asian people for a while did better at recognizing the Asian faces..

This has interesting applications especially in criminal cases where witnesses have to identify possible suspects.

Well, thats the symp update from me for the day :) Stay tuned.