It's a trained pattern recognition. When you see a face from your race, you already saw many others like it, so to distinguish people you trained to see the det

It's a trained pattern recognition. When you see a face from your race, you already saw many others like it, so to distinguish people you trained to see the details. You see a face from another race you are not accustomed to, your pattern matcher says "hey, it's that _race_" and then it stops, as it doesn't know to distinguish details for that race. An interesting study about this[1] shows that children exposed to other races (adopted and moved to another region) lose their initial training. [1] http://www.pallier.org/papers/SangrigoliPallier_finaldraft.pdf http://www.pallier.org/papers/SangrigoliPallier_finaldraft.p...