The culture of perceptual expertise and the other-race effect

In our commentary, we propose that the ORE can be viewed as a form of perceptual expertise. Like experts, we recognize own-race faces at the subordinate level as individuals and novices when recognize other-race faces at the basic level of race. Applying a perceptual expertise account, we explain the ORE in terms of its cognitive, neural, and motivational factors. We suggest that by creating a culture of “other-race” expertise, improvements in other-race face recognition can be achieved.     

The relation between hierarchical and euclidean models for psychological distances

In one well-known model for psychological distances, objects such as stimuli are placed in a hierarchy of clusters like a phylogenetic tree; in another common model, objects are represented as points in a multidimensional Euclidean space. These models are shown theoretically to be mutually exclusive and exhaustive in the following sense. The distances among a set ofn objects will be strictly monotonically related either to the distances in a hierarchical clustering system, or else to the distances in a Euclidean space of less thann — 1 dimensions, but not to both. Consequently, a lower bound on the number of Euclidean dimensions necessary to represent a set of objects is one less than the size of the largest subset of objects whose distances satisfy the ultrametric inequality, which characterizes the hierarchical model.This work was supported in part by Grant GB-13588X from the National Science Foundation. I would like to thank L. M. Kelly and A. A. J. Marley for their helpful comments and suggestions.