Face Recognition Project

Humans are remarkably good at recognizing faces. At the same time, there are age-related and experience-dependent effects on face recognition. In this project we are looking at something called "the other race effect".  The traditional definition of this effect is that people tend to be better at remembering faces that match their own racial group. However, the other-race-effect is more nuanced than one own's racial group, and in particular seems to depend on the cumulative experiences we have with faces of different racial groups throughout our lives. The goal of this project is to understand whether media exposure might play such a role in the development of face recognition. This project focuses on children 3-8 years of age, the age at which prior research has reported changes both in the other-race-effect and face recognition more broadly.

If you are an educator or parent and would like to join us in this project, please send us an email: csdl@andrew.cmu.edu.