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Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Restricted Thesis: Campus only access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Dr. Cindy Bukach

Abstract

The current study investigates the role of motivation, perceptual expertise and ORE in recognition to further understanding of the CIM. Motivational processing has been strongly implicated to impact visual processing of OR faces, but the interaction with perceptual expertise as measured by prior experience has yet to be fully supported. We hypothesize that the contradictions in the field are due to an integral difference in visual processing required across studies. The stimuli used in the studies that supported the motivation regardless of perceptual expertise did not necessarily require facial expertise processing. The stimuli did not control for category-consistent information such as hair style or facial contour which made the task comparatively easier to recall tasks that rely on facial-expertise processing of internal features cues such as eye-nose configuration, for example. When the task is made relatively more difficult using oval stimuli that require individuating at the expertise level, motivation will no be able to overcome a deficit in perceptual expertise. We provide initial support for our hypothesis by conducting a replication of the recall paradigm and the external motivation via explicit instruction to individuate using facial stimuli that do not control for identity-diagnostic cues such as hair-style. We hypothesize that perceptual expertise and motivation will interact to predict accuracy scores in recognition dependent on the target race of the facial stimuli. Our current study further explores the relationship between quality of experience and quantity of experience with other race as measures of perceptual expertise. We hypothesize that a greater quality rather than quantity of prior experience will predict ability to individuate OR faces and will therefore correlate with accuracy scores for OR faces compared to SR faces. However, external motivation will decrease other-race bias regardless of perceptual expertise in this study due to the nature of the stimuli.

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