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Cross-race recognition deficit and visual attention: do they all look (at faces) alike?

Published: 26 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

An eye-tracking study was conducted to examine cross-race recognition deficit (CRRD) or own-race bias in cross-racial eyewitness identification. It is known in the legal community that cross-racial eyewitnesses are often wrong, resulting in a number of erroneous convictions in the United States.
Forty participants in a racially diverse area of the U.S. watched a video of a property crime being committed and then returned about 24 hours later to pick the suspect out of a photo array while their eyes were tracked. A majority of participants misidentified the suspect or believed he was not in the lineup. Correct identifications were higher than expected when the eyewitness and suspect were of the same race. Conversely, misidentifications were higher than expected in the cross-race condition.
Three clusters emerged from comparison of the eye-path sequences. A "quick and confident" cluster contained largely white eyewitnesses and white suspects. A "mixed results" cluster was largely cross-race cases. A "cautious confirmation" cluster consisted of more black eyewitnesses and black suspects. ANOVAs to analyze distribution of attention revealed a main effect only for eyewitness race. An interaction effect of eyewitness race and suspect race -- indicating a connection between visual attention and CRRD -- was not found.

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  • (2013)Task-irrelevant own-race faces capture attention: Eye-tracking evidenceScandinavian Journal of Psychology10.1111/sjop.1202754:2(78-81)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2013

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cover image ACM Conferences
ETRA '08: Proceedings of the 2008 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications
March 2008
285 pages
ISBN:9781595939821
DOI:10.1145/1344471
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 26 March 2008

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Author Tags

  1. cross-race recognition deficit
  2. eye tracking
  3. eyewitness
  4. own-race bias
  5. visual attention

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ETRA '08
ETRA '08: Eye Tracking Research and Applications
March 26 - 28, 2008
Georgia, Savannah

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Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 137 submissions, 50%

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  • (2013)Task-irrelevant own-race faces capture attention: Eye-tracking evidenceScandinavian Journal of Psychology10.1111/sjop.1202754:2(78-81)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2013

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