From the Society for Neuroscience press release:<\/p>\n
\nA quirk in how the brain processes faces makes it harder to tell members of a racial outgroup apart<\/strong>, according to new research published in\u00a0eNeuro<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n
\nPeople struggle to differentiate between members of social outgroups, including different races<\/strong>. This can have dire consequences<\/strong>, like when white people misidentify a black perpetrator in a police lineup.<\/p>\n
Reggev et al. investigated what happens in the brain’s visual processing system to cause this discrepancy. The research team showed white adults a series of faces of the same race and gender. The participants indicated if they saw the same face twice in a row, or two different faces. The participants could identify two white faces as different more quickly than two black faces.<\/p>\n
The scientists then looked at the activity of the fusiform facial area using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Seeing the same face twice in a row suppresses neural activity in this brain region. The suppression lifted when participants saw a new face — but only for white faces. In fact, with new black faces, the suppression resembled seeing the same face twice in a row. This attribute of visual processing explains the difficulty people experience distinguishing between members of an outgroup. These findings may result from life-long exposure to ingroup faces or from different motivation to process such faces.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From the Society for Neuroscience press release: A quirk in how the brain processes faces makes it harder to tell members of a racial outgroup apart, according to new research… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":19859,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,324],"tags":[42,18,93,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31700"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31700"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31760,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31700\/revisions\/31760"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}