Dave Munger has just put of a great post over at Cognitive Daily, one of the sites I read pretty religiously: With a little training, we can recognize other races as well as our own. Dave discusses a recent article in Perception by a team led by Elinor McKone in which subjects were trained to recognize faces from ethnic groups other than their own and then subjected to very difficult recognition tasks. Turns out that people can get pretty good at this task, which many of us don’t do very well if we’re not ‘trained.’

I’m not going to go over the same turf that Munger does (not least of all because I won’t do it as well as he does), but I will copy his conclusion:

In other words, memory for different-race faces can be trained to work in the same way it does for same-race faces, even in a difficult peripheral-vision test, in a relatively short period of time. It doesn’t take years of immersion in a foreign culture, just an hour or so studying pictures (albeit hundreds and hundreds of them!).

This suggests that humans have a general pattern for recognizing faces that is adaptable even to unfamiliar faces. McKone et al. argue that we recognize same-race faces holistically, instead of feature by feature. Initially when we see a different-race face, we attempt to remember it using individual features, much the same we remember a animal or other object. But after some training, we learn to recognize even different-race faces holistically, which can be more accurate, but which doesn’t work as well when faces are upside-down.

Briefly, the research runs against the tendency to see the psychological or neural effects of social conditioning (like living in socially segregated environments) as the cause of social conditions. That is, there’s a tendency to want to argue that humans are innately racist, sexist, biased, hostile to those different, hierarchical, or whatever…. This kind of research tends to be essentialist and usually appeals to some sort of ‘genetic programming,’ but typically with no genetic evidence or even a plausible account of this social attitude might emerge from the genes, neural chemistry or any other biological mechanism.

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There’s a short review of Gary Marcus’ new book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, on The New York Times website. The review, ‘Patch Job’ by Annie Murphy Paul, argues that the book is a good central idea that doesn’t have enough development to carry the weight of every chapter.

Marcus, it seems, has a problem: an appealing and intriguing idea that isn’t quite as big as he claims. To solve it, he reaches for that rhetorical kluge, the straw man, setting up and then sweeping aside the notion that the human mind is infallible.

Apparently, Marcus sets up a series of straw men to knock down — human thought as perfect and infallible — to oppose the kluge (rhymes with ‘huge’) model of the human brain.

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WordPress has added a new feature, an automatically generated list of related posts that appears at the bottom of each post you view. This list will provide links both within this site and to other WordPress blogs, and occasionally to other blogs on other sites.

They’ve just started rolling this feature out (see the announcement here), and so far it’s mostly in-house: this blog and across WordPress. Posts like the ones on dopamine and addiction, two languages & theory of mind, and others already have links on them. Hopefully it should provide all of us a new way to network.

Of course if you are interested in the stuff on this blog, you can check out our Popular Posts page (just updated), as well as explore things through the category cloud, for example, on stress, brain mechanisms, and cultural theory. The entire category cloud appears on the left side of the main page, down past the blogroll.