Researchers agree that people can recognize faces of their own race more accurately than faces of other races (known as Own-race Effect), but disagree on which race faces draw attention preferentially. To answer this question, in the present study we used neutral Caucasian and Asian faces as experiment stimuli and accomplished 4 experiments in a simplified Attentioanl Blink paradigm. In experiment 1, we found that own and other-race faces did not differ in drawing attention. In experiment 2, other-race faces captured attention more preferentially than own-race faces when stimuli set size was increased. In 3 we excluded a possible strategy used by the subjects in previous two experiments and replicated the results of experiment 2. In experiment 4, subjects learned to be familiar with the faces before completing Attentional Blink task and the results indicated that the attentional preference to other-race faces disappeared. Taken together, all these results suggest that we do prefer to attend to other-race faces than own-race faces, but only when those other-race faces were unfamiliar.
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