The influence of nationality on the accuracy of face and recognition.
The article that I chose to review can be found in "The American Journal of Psychology". Nathan Daniel Doty in Pensacola, Florida held this study. The study included sixty English and United States citizens. Each of these people was tested to see how nationality affects their ability to recognize prior witnessed faces and voices. The subjects looked at front facial pictures and then were asked to select ten oblique facial pictures. The subjects listened to recorded voices and then had to choose ten of those voices. They were then asked to identify a male and female voice from England, Belize, France, and the United States.
The experimenter came up with two theories. The facial prototype theory, and the facial schema theory. The facial schema theory is when the mind develops an algorithm, which is a rule or procedure for solving a problem. This theory state recognizing a face would be automatic. The only problem with this is that the person was only exposed to a certain type and will have a limited and biased schemata.
The facial prototype theory is based on an individual's past exposure. It compares that face at hand to on it's the person's memory. I guess this is why people say "Hey you know whom he looks like- The prototype is a mixture of all the faces the person has seen plus the new faces. Exposure to a persons same nationality or group can trigger a persons identification skills.
This experiment had facial pictures and voice recordings that were taken from ten men and women from four countries. They were from France, Belize, England, and the United States. They were chosen because of their availability, English fluency, willing to participate, and their ages ran from twenty to forty.
The racial make up included three African-Americans and seven Caucasian males and two African-American, one Hispanic, and seven Caucasian women all from the United States.
