

Research on the other race effect has mainly focused on the African American and Caucasian races. A final suggestion is that faces of the same race are encoded more deeply, leading a witness to have a more detailed memory for those faces but there has not been much research to support this hypothesis. However, other races might not encode these same features. Another hypothesis is that each race pays attention to certain facial details to differentiate between faces. The socio-cognitive account predicts that motivational and/or attentional components over focus on the race of a person. The perceptual expertise account suggests that with an increase of exposure to one's own race, perceptual mechanisms develop which allow people to be more proficient at remembering faces of their own race. Various explanations for this effect have been proposed. Studies investigating this effect have shown that a person is better able to recognize faces that match their own race but are less reliable at identifying other more unfamiliar races, thus inhibiting encoding.

the own-race bias, cross-race effect, other-ethnicity effect, same-race advantage) is one factor thought to impact the accuracy of facial recognition. Unreliability of eyewitness identifications may be a result of mismatching between how faces are holistically processed and how composite systems retrieve features in faces during an event. Face-specific cognitive and neural processes show contributions to holistic processing and recognition in the episodic memories of eyewitnesses. Because courts rely on eyewitness facial recognition, it is important to acknowledge that identification is not always accurate. It can only get more challenging for a person to accurately encode a face when they themselves are experiencing a traumatic event. This finding provides a starting point for estimating the accuracy of eyewitnesses' identification of others involved in a traumatic event. When participants were given a basic memory test from an array of photos or a lineup, they struggled to accurately identify the images and had low recognition. People struggle to identify faces in person or from photos, a difficulty arising from the encoding of faces.
