Individuating experience moderates the effect of implicit racial bias on eye movements to other race faces: a cross-cultural study

The present cross-cultural study investigated gaze behaviour in the context of assessing the aesthetic value of figurative paintings depicting White and East Asian individuals in social scenes. Across three experiments, we examined how implicit racial attitudes and self-reported individuating experiences influenced gaze patterns when participants evaluated their liking of these paintings. Despite no requirement to inspect faces in the paintings, the results revealed that participants with negative implicit attitudes toward other-race individuals and limited individuating experience with those groups, spent more time fixating on other-race faces. This relationship between implicit attitudes and individuating experience in guiding gaze behaviour was consistent across both British and Chinese participants, despite differing definitions of same- and other-race faces between the groups. Our findings suggest that gaze behaviour during the aesthetic evaluation of figurative paintings is shaped by an interaction between attitudinal and experiential factors, which operates across cultural contexts.