title: The neural signature of the own-race bias: evidence from event-related potentials.
abstract: Participants are more accurate at remembering faces of their own relative to another ethnic group (own-race bias, ORB). This phenomenon has been explained by reduced perceptual expertise, or alternatively, by the categorization of other-race faces into social out-groups and reduced effort to individuate such faces. We examined event-related potential (ERP) correlates of the ORB, testing recognition memory for Asian and Caucasian faces in Caucasian and Asian participants. Both groups demonstrated a significant ORB in recognition memory. ERPs revealed more negative N170 amplitudes for other-race faces in both groups, probably reflecting more effortful structural encoding. Importantly, the ethnicity effect in left-hemispheric N170 during learning correlated significantly with the behavioral ORB. Similarly, in the subsequent N250, both groups demonstrated more negative amplitudes for other-race faces, and during test phases, this effect correlated significantly with the ORB. We suggest that ethnicity effects in the N170 reflect an early categorization of other-race faces into a social out-group, resulting in less efficient encoding and thus decreased memory. Moreover, ethnicity effects in the N250 may represent the "tagging" of other-race faces as perceptually salient, which hampers the recognition of these faces.
authors.affiliation: DFG Research Unit Person Perception, Department of General Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Holger
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wiese
authors.forename: Jürgen M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Kaufmann
authors.forename: Stefan R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Schweinberger
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D044466:Asian People; D015982:Bias; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D044469:Racial Groups; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D055815:Young Adult