Cognitive Neuroscience Society

The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
MENUMENU
  • Home
  • Annual Meeting
        • General Information
          • What to Expect at CNS 2023
          • CNS 2023 Mobile App
          • CNS 2023 Giveaway
          • CNS 2023 Giveaway Winners
          • Accessibility at CNS
          • General Information
          • Code of Conduct
          • Dates and Deadlines
          • Hotel Reservations
          • Poster Guidelines
          • Poster Printing Discount
          • Annual Meeting Workshop Policy & Application
          • Exhibit with us!
        • Program
          • Thank you to our Partners
          • CNS 2023 Program Booklet
          • Schedule Overview
          • Program-at-a-Glance
          • CNS 30th Anniversary Dance Party
          • Keynote Address
          • George A. Miller Awardee
          • Distinguished Career Contributions Awardee
          • Young Investigator Awardees
          • CNS at 30: Perspectives on the Roots, Present, and Future of Cognitive Neuroscience
          • Invited-Symposium Sessions
          • Symposium Sessions
          • Data Blitz Session Schedule
          • Poster Schedule & Session Information
          • JoCN Travel Fellowship Award
          • GSA/PFA Award Winners
          • Workshops, Socials & Special Events
        • Registration
          • Registration
          • Registration FAQ
          • Registration Policies, Cancellations & Refunds
        • News/Press
          • CNS 2023 Press Room
          • CNS 2022 Blog
          • CNS 2021 Blog
          • CNS 2020 Blog
        • Submissions
          • 2023 Poster Printing Discount
          • Submission Requirements
          • Submit a Poster
          • Submit a Symposium
          • GSA or PFA Application
          • Data Blitz
          • Frequently Asked Submission Questions
        • Archive
          • CNS 2020 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2019 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2018 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2017 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2016 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2015 Conference Videos
          • Previous Meetings Programs & Abstracts
  • About CNS
    • Boards and Committees
    • CNS Statement: Black Lives Matter
  • Membership
    • Information and Benefits
    • Join or Renew Membership
    • Membership FAQs
    • Member Discounts
    • Newsletter
      • Submit an Announcement
      • Current Newsletter
      • Newsletter FAQs
      • Past Newsletters
  • Awards
    • George A. Miller Award
    • Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions Award
    • Young Investigator Award
    • Young Investigator Award Nominations
    • 2023 YIA Nomination Form
    • JoCN Travel Fellowship Award
  • News Center
    • CNS Blog
    • CNS 2023 Press Room
    • CNS 2023 Blog
    • CNS 2022 Blog
    • CNS 2021 Blog
    • CNS 2020 Blog
    • CNS 2019 Blog
    • Blog Archives
    • Quick Tips for Getting Started on Twitter
    • Media Contact
  • My CNS
  • Contact Us
post

We See Race – and Create Social Categories – Quickly

March 15, 2014

credit: Marta Sanz Smith, available under GNU Free Documentation License

credit: Marta Sanz Smith, available under GNU Free Documentation License

CNS 2014 Blog

Part 1 of 2 about the role of social context in how we see people

When you look at a face, you don’t just see what’s in front of you. You are also processing a whole host of social information about the person. And this happens fast – as quick as one-tenth of a second – according to new research that shows that we almost immediately categorize people into social groups independent of racial or other visual cues to group membership.

“Many prominent models of face and person perception ignore the role of the social context,” says Jay Van Bavel of New York University. Work by Van Bavel and others, being presented next month at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) annual meeting in Boston, hopes to “illuminate the fundamental role of social relationships, goals, and context” in how we perceive people, Van Bavel says.

Using behavioral studies, electroencephalography (EEG), and fMRI imaging, Van Bavel and his colleagues have been studying how group identities shape our evaluations of other people. In one experiment, he found that assigning people to a mixed-race group overrides racial biases – suggesting that our perceptions of race are more about whether people are part of our social group than about the color of a person’s skin.

As Van Bavel and Mina Cikara of Carnegie Mellon University argue in a new review paper in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a growing body of work shows that how we categorize ourselves into groups is very flexible and dependent on a number of situational factors. Therefore, it is necessary to blend social psychology with neuroscience to understand how we view “us” vs. “them.”

A key question is whether our brains can visually see race. In new work, Van Bavel and colleagues tested whether Afrocentric versus Caucasian facial features are still represented in the visual system, even when there is no evidence of racial bias. As in previous behavioral studies, the researchers assigned participants to mixed-race groups where they had to memorize the faces of the members of their team. They then looked at how the participants categorized their team members while in an fMRI scanner.

The researchers found that despite participants identifying faces of a different race as part of their team, “multi-voxel pattern” analysis revealed race-based brain responses in the visual cortex: The researchers could identify the race of the faces based on an analysis of the participants’ brain patterns while categorizing them. “Although participants may have been egalitarian in terms of their perceptions and evaluations, they were not ‘color-blind’ so to speak,” Van Bavel says.

To better understand the timing of how our brains recognize race and categorize social groups, Van Bavel’s team is using EEG data. “According to most models of person perception, race should come first because it is visually salient and laden with stereotypic and prejudicial associations,” he says. “However, we have two EEG experiments showing that group membership may alter perceptual responses as early as 100 milliseconds after people are presented with a face.”

This research is evidence, he says, that people are highly sensitive to group alignments and these identities “appear to tune the perceptual system”. This is actually good news for racial stereotypes and bias: “People are not passive victims of their implicit racial biases,” Van Bavel says. “Instead, they may be able to create new environments where a common in-group identity can help shape their automatic reactions to others.”

Van Bavel will present this work as part of the mini-symposium Putting Person Perception In Context: Insights from Social Neuroscience on Sunday, April 6 at the CNS meeting in Boston. Read more about how race interacts with gender and emotion in a blog post later this week, featuring work by Jon Freeman, also to be presented in the mini-symposium.

-Lisa M.P. Munoz

Press can register now to attend the CNS annual meeting in Boston.

By lmunoz Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: face, perception, race, social, social neuroscience, stereotype, visual

Previous article: Our Brains Are Not Split When it Comes to Word Versus Face Recognition
Next article: Our Visual World is Not Fact: Our Highly Flexible View of Race, Gender, Emotion, and More

Recent Posts

  • CNS 2023: Day 2
  • Forget About It: Investigating How We Purge Thoughts from Our Minds
  • CNS 2023: Day 1 Highlights
  • Poverty: What’s the Brain Got to Do With It?
  • Unraveling Graceful Human Learning Over Time

Blog Archives

Quick Tips for Getting Started on Twitter

Cognitive Neuroscience Society
c/o Center for Mind and Brain
267 Cousteau Place, Davis, CA 95618
916-955-6080: for CNS Membership Questions
805-450-7490: for annual meeting questions about- registration, posters, symposium
916-409-5069: Fax Line
email: meeting@cogneurosociety.org

Recent Posts

  • CNS 2023: Day 2
  • Forget About It: Investigating How We Purge Thoughts from Our Minds
  • CNS 2023: Day 1 Highlights
  • Poverty: What’s the Brain Got to Do With It?
  • Unraveling Graceful Human Learning Over Time

Archives

Blog Archives

Previous Meeting Programs and Abstracts

Past Newsletters

All contents © Cognitive Neuroscience Society 1995-2019

Add to Calendar

Add to Calendar
04/16/2022 11:00 AM
04/16/2022 12:00 PM
America/Los_Angeles
How Prior Knowledge Shapes Encoding of New Memories
Description of the event
Grand Ballroom A
Create an Account

Login Utility