Us versus them: Understanding the process of race perception with event-related brain potentials

Abstract

Race is powerful social signal, imbued with a great deal of meaning and capable of affecting a wide range of behaviours and judgements. This review focuses on the use of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to better understand the process and implications of race perception. Research to date repeatedly demonstrates the speed and automaticity with which racial category membership is encoded. The quick and relatively obligatory encoding of racial ingroup and outgroup distinctions in turn affects a variety of subsequent racially biased behaviours. Such findings not only speak to the close link between social categorization and behaviour, but also have been used to understand how the effects of race perception can be moderated.

Keywords:

• Race perception
• Event-related brain potentials
• Stereotyping
• Prejudice

Notes

¹ N100 race differences also replicated in one of the three studies (Ito & Urland, 2005, Study 2), but not the other two. N100 race effects have typically been less robust than the P200 and N200 effects. Given the sensitivity of these components to visual attention in general, we have suggested that increasing the complexity of the stimulus array and/or the task may compete with racial information for attention, slowing the effects of race information somewhat from the N100 to P200 (Willadsen-Jensen & Ito, 2006).

² Although responses to Asian faces were not different from responses to White faces (or Blacks faces) in the P200 and N200 in He et al. (2009), these authors did find differences between Asian and White faces in earlier components.

³ Note that many other studies show implicit stereotyping effects even when participants are not explicitly instructed to attend to prime race (e.g., Judd, Blair, & Chapleau, 2004; Payne, 2001). This suggests that top-down activation caused by imposing a racial judgement of the primes is not necessary for producing race effects on the gun/insect judgement.

⁴ The relation of the N200 race effects seen in studies such as Ito and Urland (2003) to the N250 effects reported In Tanaka and Pierce (2009) is not yet clear. Although the two components manifest with a similar latency, and show broadly similar sensitivity to individuation manipulations (Kubota, 2010), they have different scalp distributions (more anterior for what we call the N200 in this paper and more posterior for the N250).

⁵ While the focus of this review is on early perceptual differentiation between racial ingroup and outgroup faces, we note that some studies have investigated more sustained differences that occur during encoding in ORE tasks. Effects in an ERP response called the Dm, or difference due to memory, which reflects encoding that differentiates subsequently remembered from forgotten faces over longer time periods (e.g., 300–1000 ms after stimulus onset) have been examined for ingroup and outgroup faces. Results have been quite variable across studies and subjects of different races (Herzmann et al., 2011; Lucas et al., 2011). As a result, it is not yet clear how encoding differences that occur slightly later in processing relate to the ORE.