The goal of the proposed research is to investigate how social category information such as race, gender, and age affect the perception of faces. This will be done by drawing on work from two related yet not-well-integrated lines of research. The first deals with early perceptual processing of faces, and the second focuses more generally on impression formation. Research in the former tradition has not often addressed the role of social category information whereas work in the latter tradition has not addressed how early perceptual processes affect outcomes such as stereotyping and prejudice. ? ? Preliminary research we have done using event-related brain potentials (ERPOs) shows that target race and gender have multiple discrete effects on the processing of faces beginning as early as 100 ms after stimulus onset (Ito & Urland, in press). Moreover, these effects differ throughout the time course of processing. Based on this, the working hypothesis of the proposed research is that social category membership affects the perception of faces at very early stages of processing, and that it has different effects as processing progresses. Studies are proposed that (a) assess the degree to which the perception of social category membership is a multi-staged process, (b) examine whether a single model can account for processing of different group dimensions, and (c) assess how early perceptual aspects of face processing relate to stereotyping and prejudice. More generally, the proposed research will integrate models from cognitive neuroscience on face perception with social psychological models of social perception with the ultimate goal of better understanding the full time course of how social cues are extracted from faces and later affect the activation of stereotypes and prejudice. ? ?

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01MH071257-02
Application #
6909042
Study Section
Social Psychology, Personality and Interpersonal Processes Study Section (SPIP)
Program Officer
Quinn, Kevin J
Project Start
2004-07-01
Project End
2009-04-30
Budget Start
2005-05-01
Budget End
2006-04-30
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
2005
Total Cost
$183,798
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Colorado at Boulder
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
007431505
City
Boulder
State
CO
Country
United States
Zip Code
80309
Kubota, Jennifer T; Ito, Tiffany (2017) Rapid race perception despite individuation and accuracy goals. Soc Neurosci 12:468-478
Ito, Tiffany A; Tomelleri, Silvia (2017) Seeing is not stereotyping: the functional independence of categorization and stereotype activation. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 12:758-764
Willadsen-Jensen, Eve; Ito, Tiffany A (2015) The effect of context on responses to racially ambiguous faces: changes in perception and evaluation. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 10:885-92
Senholzi, Keith B; Depue, Brendan E; Correll, Joshua et al. (2015) Brain activation underlying threat detection to targets of different races. Soc Neurosci 10:651-62
Kubota, Jennifer T; Ito, Tiffany A (2014) The role of expression and race in weapons identification. Emotion 14:1115-24
Senholzi, Keith B; Ito, Tiffany A (2013) Structural face encoding: How task affects the N170's sensitivity to race. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 8:937-42
Ito, Tiffany A; Willadsen-Jensen, Eve C; Kaye, Jesse T et al. (2011) Contextual Variation in Automatic Evaluative Bias to Racially-Ambiguous Faces. J Exp Soc Psychol 47:818-823
Ito, Tiffany A; Bartholow, Bruce D (2009) The neural correlates of race. Trends Cogn Sci 13:524-31
Kubota, Jennifer T; Ito, Tiffany A (2007) Multiple Cues in Social Perception: The Time Course of Processing Race and Facial Expression. J Exp Soc Psychol 43:738-752