14 DAY TRIAL // There are many people who have trouble telling apart individuals from different races, and a team of psychologists of the University of Glasgow, UK, have finally found out why.
It appears that the confusion comes from a brain mechanism that is responsible for the 'other-race effect', and this finding could prove very useful, especially in determining the reliability of eyewitness evidence in criminal trials.
The research was carried out by Roberto Caldara and colleagues of the University of Glasgow, UK, who had 24 Caucasian and East Asian volunteers, taking part at the experiment.
The participants were shown pairs of pictures, one after another, either of two people of the same racial group – East Asian or Caucasian, or photos of the same person but with two different facial expressions.
The brain activity of the volunteers was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG), while they were watching the photos.
EEG measures the electrical activity produced by the firing of neurons in the brain, and when someone sees the same face twice, the EEG pattern is the same every time, even if the second time it might be a little lower.
On the other hand, if the faces are different, then so are the brain activity patterns, New Scientist reports.
Caldara was rather surprised, by what he found, because when the volunteers were shown faces of people of a different race than their own, their neurons responded as if they saw the same person, whether that was the case or not.
And even more surprisingly, the results were the same for both Caucasian and East Asian volunteers.
So Caldara concluded that this must be “a universal phenomenon in our perception,” and added the the only way that people can learn to identify other races is to live among them.
Even if previous studies have identified the brain region responsible for the phenomenon, the mechanisms triggering it were unclear.
The researchers said that this technique could be used to identify unreliable witnesses in criminal trials, because “if a witness has a really clear other-race effect, we could not be sure that they had really recognized a defendant of another race.”
John Brigham of Florida State University in Tallahassee, sees this technique as fascinating but not fully ready to be used in court.