Abstract
Face perception, a fundamental part of social interaction, is honed from infancy to adulthood and influenced by visual experience. Previous research with adults report mixed results regarding event-related potential (ERP) responses to race, and such responses have yet to be examined in children who already show a behavioral own-race recognition bias (Lee, Anzures, Quinn, Pascalis, & Slater, 2011). Only one study has examined ERP sensitivities to implicit racial biases in adults (Ofan, Rubin, & Amodio, 2011). Thus, here, we examined children’s and adults’ ERPs to own- and other-race faces, and whether such ERPs are related to implicit biases. Caucasian young adults and 5- to 10-year-olds completed two blocks of a race categorization task while their electroencephalograpic waveforms were recorded. In each block, participants were asked to press a button whenever they viewed a Caucasian or an East Asian face (order counterbalanced across participants). Responses to stimuli that did not require a button press were analyzed. Prior to the EEG task, participants completed a child-friendly implicit association task measuring racial biases. Preliminary results replicate past reports of developmental changes in ERPs with larger P100 and N170 responses and longer latencies in children compared to adults (p values < .001). There was also a trend towards larger P100 responses for other-race compared to own-race faces (p = .07). Greater implicit own-race biases were associated with larger bilateral P100 responses to other- than own-race faces in children and adults, and larger bilateral N250 responses to own- than other-race faces in adults (p values < .05). Our results suggest that past mixed findings regarding ERPs and race in adult samples may be driven by individual differences in participants’ implicit racial biases. Our results also show that implicit racial biases are associated with the P100 in children and adults and the N250 in adults.