Dynamic neural mechanisms underlie race disparities in social cognition.

Race disparities in behavior may emerge in several ways, some of which may be independent of implicit bias. To mitigate the pernicious effects of different race disparities for racial minorities, we must understand whether they are rooted in perceptual, affective, or cognitive processing with regard to race perception. We used fMRI to disentangle dynamic neural mechanisms predictive of two separable race disparities that can be obtained from a trustworthiness ratings task. Increased coupling between regions involved in perceptual and affective processing when viewing Black versus White faces predicted less later racial trust disparity, which was related to implicit bias. In contrast, increased functional coupling between regions involved in controlled processing predicted less later disparity in the differentiation of Black versus White faces with regard to perceived trust, which was unrelated to bias. These findings reveal that distinct neural signatures underlie separable race disparities in social cognition that may or may not be related to implicit bias.

The impact of motivation on race-based impression formation.

Affective biases toward racial out-group members, characterized by White perceivers' negative evaluations of Black individuals, prevail in U.S. culture. Such affective associations have been found to guide race-based impression formation. Accordingly, individuals may strive to resolve inconsistencies when perceiving targets violating their expectations. The current study focuses on the impact of evaluative incongruence on the activity of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) - a brain region previously shown to support impression formation. When asking participants to form impressions of positively and negatively evaluated Black and White individuals, we found preferential dmPFC activity in response to individuals paired with information that violates race-based affective associations. Importantly, individual differences in internal motivation to respond without prejudice (IMS) were found to shape the extent to which dmPFC activity indexes the interactive effects of race and affective associations during impression formation. Specifically, preferential dmPFC activity in response to evaluatively incongruent targets (i.e., Black-positive & White-negative) was present among participants with lower, but not those with higher, levels of IMS. Implications and future directions are discussed in the context of dmPFC involvement in social cognition.

Influence of Economic Scarcity on Race Perception.

Racial socioeconomic gaps are widened in periods of economic recession. Besides social and institutional factors, black people also struggle with many psychological factors. The literature reports racial-biased complex behaviors and high-level processes that are influenced by economic scarcity. A previous study found a bias at the perceptual level: an experimental manipulation of scarcity (a subliminal priming paradigm) lowered the black-white race categorization threshold. Here we present a conceptual replication in a higher ecological setup. In our main analysis we compared the categorization threshold of participants that received the Brazilian government's emergency economic aid in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (n = 136) and participants that did not receive the economic aid (n = 135) in an online psychophysical task that presented faces in a black-white race continuum. Additionally, we analyzed the economic impact of COVID-19 on household income, and in cases of family unemployment. Our results do not support the claim that perception of race is influenced by economic scarcity. Interestingly, we found that when people differ greatly in terms of racial prejudice, they encode visual information related to race differently. People with higher scores on a prejudice scale needed more phenotypic traits of the black race to categorize a face as black. We discuss the results in terms of differences in method and sample.

The Efficiency of Demography in Face Perception.

When we look at a face, we cannot help but "read" it: Beyond simply processing its identity, we also form robust impressions of both transient psychological states (e.g., surprise) and stable character traits (e.g., trustworthiness). But perhaps the most fundamental traits we extract from faces are their social demographics, for example, race, age, and gender. How much exposure is required to extract such properties? Curiously, despite extensive work on the temporal efficiency of extracting both higher-level social properties (such as competence and dominance) and more basic characteristics (such as identity and familiarity), this question remains largely unexplored for demography. We correlated observers' percepts of the race/age/gender of unfamiliar faces viewed at several brief durations (and then masked) with their judgments after unlimited exposure. Performance reached asymptote by 100 ms, was above chance by only 33.33 ms, and had a similar temporal profile to detecting faces in the first place. This was true even when the property to be reported wasn't revealed until after the face had disappeared, and when the faces were matched for several lower-level visual properties. Collectively, these results demonstrate that the extraction of demographic features from faces is highly efficient, and can truly be done at a glance.

How do Asians perceive Caucasian eyes? Electrophysiological correlates of perceiving racial differences from the eyes region of the face.

Past research has found that several brain event-related potentials (ERPs) were sensitive to the perception of ethnic differences displayed on human faces. This body of research suggests that the phenomenon of "race perception" involves a cascade of cognitive processes that includes both automatic and overt attentional mechanisms. However, most of these studies used stimuli depicting whole faces rather than stimuli depicting separate facial features. Therefore, it is still largely unknown if ERP responses to racial differences are the result of a holistic processing of the whole face, or whether they can be accounted for by the perception of single facial features. To address this issue, we examined whether a single facial feature, the eyes region, can provide sufficient information to trigger known ERP correlates of race perception such as the P2, the N400 and the Late Positive Complex (LPC). Specifically, we showed pictures depicting only the eyes region of Caucasian and Asian faces to a sample of Asian participants. We found that the P2 was larger for other-race (OR) compared to same-race (SR) eyes, and that the N400 was larger for SR compared to OR eyes. The effects on the P2 may suggest an enhanced vigilance response to OR eyes whereas the N400 effect could reflect a signal of familiarity triggered by SR eyes. These results indicate that a specific facial feature, the eyes region, can account for known effects of race perception on early brain potentials. Our findings also indicate that well-known early neural correlates of race perception can be triggered in the absence of a holistic processing of the whole face.

Culture Impacts the Neural Response to Perceiving Outgroups Among Black and White Faces.

Outgroup members (e.g., individuals whose racial identity differs from perceivers') are stigmatized in Eastern and Western cultures. However, it remains an open question how specific cultural influences affect stigmatization. In this study, we assessed whether cultural learning (i.e., social information acquired from the people in one's environment) associated with Chinese individuals' relocation to the United States differentiated the response to multiple outgroups. Two types of cultural learning predict diverging responses to outgroups - awareness of stereotypes about different racial outgroups is associated with increased negative affect and cognitive control toward the stereotyped outgroup. Conversely, intergroup contact attenuates those responses, and does so to a greater extent for individuals from Western cultures. As Chinese-Americans would have had more opportunities to have contact with both White and Black individuals (relative to the Chinese participants), we explored their responses to outgroups as well. Because the neural regions associated with stereotyping and intergroup contact have been well-characterized, we used neuroimaging to disentangle these possibilities. Eighteen White American, 18 Chinese-American, and 17 Chinese participants - who had relocated to the United States less than 1 year prior - viewed images of Black and White individuals while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants also completed measures of awareness of cultural stereotypes in the United States about Black and White individuals, implicit bias, and experiences with White and Black individuals. Behaviorally, White American and Chinese-American participants had more intergroup contact with either race than did Chinese participants, but there was no effect of participant group on stereotype knowledge or implicit bias. When viewing faces of White (as compared to Black) individuals while undergoing fMRI, White American (relative to Chinese) participants had attenuated activation in regions of the brain associated with cognitive control, including the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsal striatum, and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Chinese-Americans' neural response to either race did not differ from White American or Chinese participants. Taken together, outgroup biases seemed to emerge in a culturally-dependent way based on variability in intergroup contact, but not necessarily awareness of stereotypes.

The Face-Race Lightness Illusion Is Not Driven by Low-level Stimulus Properties: An Empirical Reply to Firestone and Scholl (2014).

Levin and Banaji (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135, 501-512, 2006) reported a lightness illusion in which participants appeared to perceive Black faces to be darker than White faces, even though the faces were matched for overall brightness and contrast. Recently, this finding was challenged by Firestone and Scholl (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 2014), who argued that the nominal illusion remained even when the faces were blurred so as to make their race undetectable, and concluded that uncontrolled perceptual differences between the stimulus faces drove at least some observations of the original distortion effect. In this paper we report that measures of race perception used by Firestone and Scholl were insufficiently sensitive. We demonstrate that a forced choice race-identification task not only reveals that participants could detect the race of the blurred faces but also that participants' lightness judgments often aligned with their assignment of race.

Age and executive ability impact the neural correlates of race perception.

Decreased executive ability elicits racial bias. We clarified the neural correlates of how executive ability contributes to race perception by comparing young adults (YA) to a population with highly variable executive ability: older adults (OA). After replicating work showing higher race bias in OA vs YA and a negative association between bias and executive ability, a subsample of White YA and OA perceived Black and White faces and cars during functional magnetic resonance imaging. YA had higher executive ability than OA, and OA had higher variability in executive ability. When perceiving Black vs White faces, YA exhibited more dorsolateral prefrontal cortex recruitment-a region previously implicated in regulating prejudiced responses-than OA. Moreover, OA with relatively impaired executive ability had more amygdala activity toward Black faces vs OA with relatively intact executive ability, whereas responses to White faces did not differ. Both YA and OA with relatively intact executive ability had stronger amygdala-ventrolateral prefrontal cortex connectivity when perceiving Black vs White faces. These findings are the first to disentangle age from executive ability differences in neural recruitment when perceiving race, potentially informing past behavioral work on aging and race perception.

Gendered Facial Cues Influence Race Categorizations.

Race and gender categories, although long presumed to be perceived independently, are inextricably tethered in social perception due in part to natural confounding of phenotypic cues. We predicted that target gender would affect race categorizations. Consistent with this hypothesis, feminine faces compelled White categorizations, and masculine faces compelled Asian or Black categorizations of racially ambiguous targets (Study 1), monoracial targets (Study 2), and real facial photographs (Study 3). The efficiency of judgments varied concomitantly. White categorizations were rendered more rapidly for feminine, relative to masculine faces, but the opposite was true for Asian and Black categorizations (Studies 1-3). Moreover, the effect of gender on categorization efficiency was compelled by racial phenotypicality for Black targets (Study 3). Finally, when targets' race prototypicality was held constant, gender still influenced race categorizations (Study 4). These findings indicate that race categorizations are biased by presumably unrelated gender cues.