Explicit categorization goals affect attention-related processing of race and gender during person construal

The Social Neuroscience of Prejudice

“…Among White participant perceivers, it is typically larger to Black than White faces (Ito & Urland, 2003). Research with Black participants, in addition to White participants, has replicated this pattern and clarified that it is typically larger to racial outgroup faces rather than Black faces per se (Dickter & Bartholow, 2007;Willadsen-Jensen & Ito, 2008;Volpert-Esmond & Bartholow, 2019). This effect has been observed even when participants are instructed to attend to a target person's gender (Ito & Urland, 2003), to a non-social feature of a face image (Ito & Tomelleri, 2017), or to individuating information (Kubota & Ito, 2017), indicating that the P200 is sensitive to race independent of explicit task instructions.…”

Multifarious person perception: How social perceivers manage the complexity of intersectional targets

“…Specifically, participants’ P200 amplitudes—which are components of an event‐related potential that vary in response to seeing Black versus White faces as well as to seeing male versus female faces (Ito & Senholzi, ; Ito & Urland, )—seem to have two distinct principal components: one whose amplitude varies in response to targets’ race (but not to targets’ gender), and one whose amplitude varies in response to targets’ gender (but not to targets’ race). Interestingly, when participants are instructed to categorize targets by race, the P200 component that responds to gender becomes attenuated, and when participants are instructed to categorize targets by gender, the reverse is true (Volpert‐Esmond & Bartholow, ). This evidence is all highly consistent with the perspective of compartmentalization assumptions.…”

A Functional Coupling of Brain and Behavior During Social Categorization of Faces

“…Thus, it stands to reason that the face-elicited P2 reflects allocation of attention to features of faces that enhance perception and facilitate identification of social categories. Supporting this idea, recent findings show that top-down categorization goals enhance the influence of goal-relevant features and suppress the influence of goalirrelevant features on face-elicited P2 amplitude (Volpert-Esmond & Bartholow, 2019).…”

“…Studies 1 and 2 report new data from samples previously reported in Volpert- and Volpert- Esmond and Bartholow (2019), respectively. Here, we report only data from the face-categorization tasks administered in each study.…”

“…Researchers have identified an early-latency (~180 ms following face onset) deflection in the ERP waveform known as the P2 that appears to reflect processes associated with the attempt to extract information about a target person's social category memberships. The face-elicited P2 is highly sensitive to social categories, such as race and gender (Amodio, 2009;Correll et al, 2006;Dickter & Bartholow, 2007;Dickter & Kittel, 2012;He et al, 2009;Ito & Bartholow, 2009;Ito & Tomelleri, 2017;Ito & Urland, 2003Kubota & Ito, 2007, 2017Simon & Gutsell, 2019;Volpert-Esmond & Bartholow, 2019;Volpert-Esmond et al, 2017;Willadsen-Jensen & Ito, 2006, 2015. In the broader information-processing literature, P2 amplitude has been associated with allocation of visual selective attention to goal-relevant stimuli (Hillyard & Münte, 1984;Luck & Hillyard, 1994;Wijers et al, 1989), which improves perception and performance by modifying sensory inputs early in processing (Mangun, 1995).…”