Tomás A. Palma

My research investigates how social categories influence our perception and recognition of others. Specifically, I focus on the cross-race recognition deficit (CRD) – the tendency for people to more accurately recognize faces of their own race compared to other races – and exploring methods to mitigate this effect. I also examine how processing goals and task requirements influence the encoding of category information (e.g., age and gender) from faces. In a recent line of inquiry, I am investigating people’s metacognitive awareness of the CRD, exploring whether individuals are conscious of their own biases in cross-race face recognition and whether they can control these biases.

Palma, T. A., Vieira, A., Cruz, F., & Mata, A. (2024). The Effect of Face Race on Metamemory: Examining its Robustness and Underlying Mechanisms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. In press

Correll, J., Quarenta, J., Palma, T. A., Singh, B., Bernstein, M. J., & Hidalgo Vargas, O. (2024). Nonlinear relationships between eye gaze and recognition accuracy for ethnic ingroup and outgroup faces. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000395

Correll, J., Ma, D. S., Kenny, D. A., & Palma, T. A. (2024). Examining the Contribution of Physical Cues for Same- and Cross-Race Face Individuation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 50(5), 694-714. DOI: 10.1177/01461672221141510

*Cruz, F., *Palma, T. A., Bansemer, E., Correll, J., Fonseca, S., Gonçalves, P., & Santos, A. S. (2023). Do Individuation Instructions Reduce the Cross-Race Effect? A registered replication of Hugenberg, Miller, and Claypool (2007). Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 104, 104423. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2022.104423
(*equal contribution)

Palma, T. A. & Garcia-Marques, L. (2021). Does Repetition Always Improves Learning Differential effects of repetition on learning of own-race and other-race faces. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 43(2), 90-109. DOI: 10.1080/01973533.2020.1843462

Palma, T. A., Garcia-Marques, L., Marques, P., Hagá, S., & Payne, B. K. (2019). Learning what to inhibit: The influence of repeated testing on the encoding of gender and age information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116, 899-918. DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000162

person perception;
face recognition;
social categorization;
metamemory;