Processing biases for in-group and out-group faces as determined by invariant cues

Invariant facial cues such as race, age and gender provide us with reliable indicators of an individuals’ group membership relative to our own. It is well established that humans possess biases for the way in which faces are processed. As well as possessing an own-race recognition bias, whereby we are better at recognising other’s belonging to our own ethnic group, we are faster at categorising racial out-group faces. Researchers have extended the in-group recognition bias to age and gender cues, yet there is currently little knowledge available regarding age and gender categorisation biases. Experiment 1 provided novel evidence for an other-age categorisation bias. In experiment 2 an inversion paradigm was introduced, and it became evident that different processing strategies were used for age and gender judgements due to differential inversion effects. Using a new set of stimuli which attempted to control for the potential confound of hair, the results of Experiment 3 challenged the out-group biases and dual processing strategies that emerged in the previous experiments. The task difficulty in the third experiment indicates insufficient manipulation of the ages of the stimuli, making interpretations difficult, and in future, different methods should be addressed for controlling for surrounding features of the face. The study provides new evidence for other-age categorisation biases, and suggests that age and gender categorisations rely on separate neural processes. Gender categorisations; however, appear to be free from bias