Abstract■ We examined the relation between neural activity reflecting early face perception processes and automatic and controlled responses to race. Participants completed a sequential evaluative priming task, in which two-tone images of Black faces, White faces, and cars appeared as primes, followed by target words categorized as pleasant or unpleasant, while encephalography was recorded. Half of these participants were alerted that the task assessed racial prejudice and could reveal their personal bias ("alerted" condition). To assess face perception processes, the N170 component of the ERP was examined. For all participants, stronger automatic pro-White bias was associated with larger N170 amplitudes to Black than White faces. For participants in the alerted condition only, larger N170 amplitudes to Black versus White faces were also associated with less controlled processing on the word categorization task. These findings suggest that preexisting racial attitudes affect early face processing and that situational factors moderate the link between early face processing and behavior. ■

Social anxiety is the intense fear of negative evaluation by others, and it emerges uniquely from a social situation. Given its social origin, we asked whether an anxiety-inducing social situation could enhance the processing of faces linked to the situational threat. While past research has focused on how individual differences in social anxiety relate to face processing, we tested the effect of manipulated social anxiety in the context of anxiety about appearing racially prejudiced in front of a peer. Visual processing of faces was indexed by the N170 component of the event-related potential. Participants viewed faces of Black and White males, along with nonfaces, either in private or while being monitored by the experimenter for signs of prejudice in a 'public' condition. Results revealed a difference in the N170 response to Black and Whites faces that emerged only in the public condition and only among participants high in dispositional social anxiety. These results provide new evidence that anxiety arising from the social situation modulates the earliest stages of face processing in a way that is specific to a social threat, and they shed new light on how anxiety effects on perception may contribute to the regulation of intergroup responses.

Recent neuroimaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation studies indicate that the occipital cortex of congenitally blind humans is functionally relevant for nonvisual tasks. There are suggestions that the underlying cortical reorganization is restricted by a critical period. These results were based on comparison between early and late blind groups, thereby facing the problem of great variability among individuals within each group. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we studied bilingual congenitally blind individuals during use of 2 languages: one acquired early (Hebrew), the other later in life (English, at approximately 10 years). The subjects listened to chimeric words consisting of superimposed Hebrew and English nouns. They were instructed to either covertly generate a verb to the heard noun or repeat the noun, in either Hebrew or English. Lateralized activation during verb generation (vs. repeat) was found in classical language areas, in congruence with previous studies in sighted subjects. Critically, in our study, the blind participants typically also had robust left lateralized occipital differential activation during verb generation (vs. repeat), in both languages. This suggests that the critical period for plasticity persists beyond 10 years or that the visual cortex of the blind might be engaged in abstract levels of language processing, common to the 2 languages.