Abstract

The study employed the remember-know paradigm to investigate levels-of-processing effects in recognition memory for same-versus other-race faces. It was predicted that deeper processing would benefit accuracy in recognition and remembering for both own-and other-race faces. Moreover, the Cross-Race Bias (CRB) would be evident with participants more accurately recognizing faces of their own race than faces of another race. No interaction between the 2 variables was expected. Deeper processing benefited accurate remembering only. The CRB was evident with same-race faces being accurately recognised more than other-race faces, and more remember and know false positives being given to other-race faces. No interaction effect was found. The results do not support the depth of processing hypothesis for the CRB and have implications for the assumption that richer encoding could lead to a decrease in CRB by minimising false positives. Thus, in eyewitness memory richer encoding opportunities do not necessarily lead to less false cross-race identifications and care should be taken when dealing with those kinds of identifications.