Dynamic representations of race: processing goals shape race decoding in the fusiform gyri

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Social Psychology
• Neuroimaging

Background:

• Social categories like race, gender, and age significantly influence social perception and evaluation.
• The initial processing of individuals based on salient social categories is often considered automatic and unavoidable.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how specific processing goals impact the neural representation of race within the visual processing stream.
• To determine if the way individuals categorize faces affects the brain's neural encoding of racial information.

Main Methods:

• Participants were assigned to mixed-race teams and tasked with categorizing faces based on either group membership or skin color.
• Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) was used to examine neural activity patterns in response to Black and White faces.
• Neural activity was analyzed in early visual cortex, fusiform gyri (FG), and a prefrontal control region.

Main Results:

• Neural patterns in early visual cortex could decode face race above chance in both categorization tasks.
• Race decoding was significantly greater in the fusiform gyri (FG) when participants categorized faces by group membership compared to skin color.
• Race decoding was below chance in the prefrontal control region, indicating task-specific modulation.

Conclusions:

• Neural representations of race are dynamic and significantly influenced by current processing goals.
• Explicitly categorizing faces by group membership paradoxically diminished the neural representation of race in the fusiform gyri.
• These findings challenge the notion of inevitable social categorization, highlighting the brain's flexible encoding of social information.