Ethnic face categorization by Russians and Tuvinians in discrimination tasks

Abstract

The opposite tendencies towards blurring the boundaries of compact living of ethnic groups and of relocation of large groups of strangers into the territories of compact residence of local groups generate a number of specific phenomena connected with the inter-group perception. We conducted a comparative study of perception and communication of transition series of “ethnic faces” among two small-scale isolated populations and representatives of the corresponding ethnic groups in multi-ethnic cities. The participants were to solve two discrimination task, one individually, the AB=X task, the other one, the dual “same-different” task, in dyads. For all samples of subjects, of In the AB=X task, the maximum discrimination efficiency was recorded for the same no. 2—3 pair of transition images series This may indicate that all subjects relied on the morphological features stimulus faces than on anything else. Also a tendency is observed toward similarity in the dynamics of efficiency of task performance in different groups of subjects, with the exception of the sample of Russians from the metropolis. At the same time, in the dyadic experiment, subjects from megacities demonstrate different trends in terms of the maximum efficiency of task performance. The sample of Russian subjects from Moscow demonstrates a significantly smaller decrease in efficiency when approaching the edges of the transitional series of stimulus images in the AB=X task, but not in the dual task. This is probably due to different nature of the tasks, i.e. one may easily suppose a more developed ability to perceptually discriminate between ethnic faces resulting from their greater variety in the environment, as in Moscow megacity, whereas it does not seem reasonable to suppose difference in communication skills required to perform the dual task across the samples.