Is race erased? Decoding race from patterns of neural activity when skin color is not diagnostic of group boundaries |
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
Volume 8, Issue 7 (October 2013)
pages 750-755
DOI: 10.1093/scan/nss063
Kyle G. Ratner
Department of Psychology
New York University
Christian Kaul
Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science
New York University
Jay J. Van Bavel, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology
New York University
Several theories suggest that people do not represent race when it does not signify group boundaries. However, race is a visually salient social category associated with skin tone and facial features. In the current study, we investigated whether race could be decoded from distributed patterns of neural activity in the fusiform gyri and early visual cortex when visual features that often co-vary with race were orthogonal to group membership. To this end, we used multivariate pattern analysis to examine an fMRI dataset that was collected while participants assigned to mixed-race groups categorized own-race and other-race faces as belonging to their newly assigned group. Whereas conventional univariate analyses provided no evidence of biased race-based responses in the fusiform gyri or early visual cortex, multivariate pattern analysis suggested that race was represented within these regions. Moreover, race was represented in the fusiform gyri to a greater extent than early visual cortex, suggesting that the fusiform gyri results do not merely reflect low-level perceptual information (e.g., color, contrast) from early visual cortex. The findings indicate that patterns of activation within specific regions of the visual cortex may represent race even when overall activation in these regions is not driven by racial information.
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Tags: Christian Kaul, Jay J. Van Bavel, Jay Van Bavel, Kyle G. Ratner, Kyle Ratner, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience