Own-Race Faces Capture Attention Faster than Other-Race Faces: Evidence from Response Time and the N2pc

Zhou, Guomei; Cheng, Zhijie; Yue, Zhenzhu; Tredoux, Colin; He, Jibo; Wang, Ling

Own-Race Faces Capture Attention Faster than Other-Race Faces: Evidence from Response Time and the N2pc

Journal Article

2015

Journal Title

PLoS One

Link to Journal

http://journals.plos.org/plosone

Publisher

Public Library of Science

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Psychology

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Abstract

Studies have shown that people are better at recognizing human faces from their own-race than from other-races, an effect often termed the Own-Race Advantage. The current study investigates whether there is an Own-Race Advantage in attention and its neural correlates. Participants were asked to search for a human face among animal faces. Experiment 1 showed a classic Own-Race Advantage in response time both for Chinese and Black South African participants. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), Experiment 2 showed a similar Own-Race Advantage in response time for both upright faces and inverted faces. Moreover, the latency of N2pc for own-race faces was earlier than that for other-race faces. These results suggested that own-race faces capture attention more efficiently than other-race faces.