No evidence of other-race effect for Chinese faces in Malaysian non-Chinese population

The other-race effect (ORE) reflects poor recognition of faces of a different race to one’s own. According to the expertise-individuation hypothesis, this phenomenon is a consequence of limited experience with other race faces. Thus, similar experience with own and other-race faces should abolish the ORE. The aim of the present study is to explore the ORE in a multi-racial country (i.e., Malaysia) by comparing Malaysian observers’ face recognition performance for faces of a predominant racial group in Malaysia (i.e., Chinese) with faces from a nearly absent group in Malaysia (i.e., Caucasian). Malaysian Chinese, Malays and Malaysian Indians performed both the Cambridge Face Memory Test and the Cambridge face memory Test-Chinese (CFMT and CFMT-Chinese). Compared to the normative scores, Malaysian observers showed poor performance in the CFMT. Interestingly, Malays and Malaysian Indians observers´ performance was identical to that of Malaysian Chinese in the CFMT-Chinese and to the normative scores of the test. These results demonstrate the relevance of experience in shaping the ORE.