Group Information Enhances Recognition of Both Learned and Unlearned Face Appearances

Are people better at recognizing individuals of more relevant groups, such as ingroup compared to outgroup members or high-status compared to low-status individuals? Previous studies that associated faces with group information found a robust effect of group on face recognition but only tested it using the same images presented during the learning phase. They therefore cannot tell whether group information enhances encoding of the specific image presented during learning or encoding of the person who appears in it, which should generalize to other images of that person. In addition, the measures used in these studies do not sufficiently distinguish between sensitivity and response bias. In this article, we addressed these limitations and examined in three experiments the effect of group membership (Experiments 1 and 2) and social status (Experiment 3) on face recognition. In all experiments, we assessed recognition of both learned and unlearned views of the learned faces. Our results show improved recognition of ingroup members compared to outgroup members and of individuals of high-status groups compared to low-status groups for both learned and unlearned views. These effects emerged also when we used measures of memory accuracy that adequately control for response bias. These findings highlight the importance of group and status information in person recognition.