TY - JOUR
T1 - Neural adaptation to faces reveals racial outgroup homogeneity effects in early perception
AU - Hughes, Brent L.
AU - Camp, Nicholas P.
AU - Gomez, Jesse
AU - Natu, Vaidehi S.
AU - Grill-Spector, Kalanit
AU - Eberhardt, Jennifer L.
N1 - Funding Information:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. This research was supported by Stanford Dean’s Awards (to J.L.E.) and by a Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging Innovation Grant to (to B.L.H. and N.P.C.). We wish to acknowledge Nalini Ambady for her contributions at the earliest stages of this research, although she did not live to witness its progression and completion.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - A hallmark of intergroup biases is the tendency to individuate members of one’s own group but process members of other groups categorically. While the consequences of these biases for stereotyping and discrimination are well-documented, their early perceptual underpinnings remain less understood. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms of this effect by testing whether high-level visual cortex is differentially tuned in its sensitivity to variation in own-race versus other-race faces. Using a functional MRI adaptation paradigm, we measured White participants’ habituation to blocks of White and Black faces that parametrically varied in their groupwise similarity. Participants showed a greater tendency to individuate own-race faces in perception, showing both greater release from adaptation to unique identities and increased sensitivity in the adaptation response to physical difference among faces. These group differences emerge in the tuning of early face-selective cortex and mirror behavioral differences in the memory and perception of own- versus other-race faces. Our results suggest that biases for other-race faces emerge at some of the earliest stages of sensory perception.
AB - A hallmark of intergroup biases is the tendency to individuate members of one’s own group but process members of other groups categorically. While the consequences of these biases for stereotyping and discrimination are well-documented, their early perceptual underpinnings remain less understood. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms of this effect by testing whether high-level visual cortex is differentially tuned in its sensitivity to variation in own-race versus other-race faces. Using a functional MRI adaptation paradigm, we measured White participants’ habituation to blocks of White and Black faces that parametrically varied in their groupwise similarity. Participants showed a greater tendency to individuate own-race faces in perception, showing both greater release from adaptation to unique identities and increased sensitivity in the adaptation response to physical difference among faces. These group differences emerge in the tuning of early face-selective cortex and mirror behavioral differences in the memory and perception of own- versus other-race faces. Our results suggest that biases for other-race faces emerge at some of the earliest stages of sensory perception.
KW - Intergroup perception
KW - Neural adaptation
KW - Perceptual sensitivity
KW - Race
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U2 - 10.1073/pnas.1822084116
DO - 10.1073/pnas.1822084116
M3 - Article
C2 - 31262811
AN - SCOPUS:85069041915
VL - 116
SP - 14532
EP - 14537
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
SN - 0027-8424
IS - 29
ER -