The Cross-Race Effect (CRE) is a well-established phenomenon where individuals demonstrate superior accuracy in recognising faces from their racial group compared to those from other races. This has significant implications for eyewitness identification accuracy in legal contexts. Research from various sources indicates that the CRE stems from complex mechanisms:• Perceptual expertise models suggest that greater experience with own-race faces leads to more efficient processing strategies.• Social-cognitive models propose that outgroup faces are processed categorically rather than as individuals, affecting recognition. Hybrid models integrate both perceptual and social-cognitive perspectives. Key learnings • The CRE affects metamemory, meaning individuals are less accurate at predicting their ability to recognise other-race faces. This underscores the need for caution when a witness expresses high confidence in cross-race identifications.• The effect is consistent from childhood through adulthood.• Social context can modulate the CRE; for instance, White individuals may recognise other White faces better in wealthy contexts than impoverished ones, treating "poor Whites" as an outgroup.• Eye-tracking studies (McDonnell et al.) show White participants naturally focus on different facial features for own-race (upper) versus other-race (lower) faces.• Angry expressions on Black faces can surprisingly impair memory for them (Gwinn et al.), linked to stereotype-congruent categorical processing rather than increased attention.• Jurors are often insensitive to the CRE. Retrieval-phase instructions generally do not selectively reduce the CRE (Bornstein et al.), highlighting the importance of encoding processes.• Cultural priming (Marsh et al.) can implicitly shift the CRE in bicultural individuals by making a specific cultural identity salient, thereby altering face categorisation.• Efforts to reduce the CRE through Navon processing (Howard et al.) have yielded inconsistent and sometimes counterproductive results.• Individual factors like social distance and communication experience also impact recognition accuracy (Kovalenko & Surudzhii)

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