Abstract：
Faces are visual stimuli that convey rich social information. Previous experiments found better recognition for faces that were evaluated based on their social traits than on their perceptual features during encoding. Here, we ask whether this social-encoding benefit in face recognition is also found for categories of faces that we have no previous social experience with, such as other-race faces. To answer this question, we first explored whether social and perceptual evaluations for other-race faces are consistent and valid. We then asked whether social evaluations during encoding improve recognition for other-race faces. Results show that social and perceptual evaluations of own- and other-race faces were valid. We also found high agreement in social and perceptual evaluations across individuals from different races. This indicates that evaluations of other-race faces are not random but meaningful. Furthermore, we found that social evaluations facilitated face recognition regardless of race, demonstrating a social-encoding benefit for both own- and other-race faces. Our findings highlight the role of social information in face recognition and show how it can be used to improve recognition of categories of faces that are hard to recognize due to lack of experience with them.
摘要：
面部是传达丰富社会信息的视觉刺激。先前的实验发现，在编码过程中，根据其社会特征评估的面部比根据其感知特征进行评估的面部具有更好的识别能力。这里,我们问，在面部识别中，这种社会编码的好处是否也适用于我们以前没有社会经验的面孔类别，比如其他种族的面孔。为了回答这个问题,我们首先探讨了对其他种族面孔的社会和感知评价是否一致和有效。然后，我们询问编码过程中的社会评估是否可以改善对其他种族面孔的识别。结果表明，对自己和其他种族面孔的社会和感知评价是有效的。我们还发现，来自不同种族的个人在社会和感知评价方面达成了很高的共识。这表明对其他种族面孔的评估不是随机的，而是有意义的。此外，我们发现，无论种族如何，社会评估都有助于面部识别，展示了对自己和其他种族面孔的社会编码利益。我们的发现强调了社交信息在面部识别中的作用，并展示了如何将其用于改善由于缺乏经验而难以识别的面部类别的识别。
