Restricted Research - Award List, Note/Discussion Page
Fiscal Year: 2023
1847 The University of Texas at El Paso (143735)
Principal Investigator: Volpert-Esmond,Hannah Inyong
Total Amount of Contract, Award, or Gift (Annual before 2011): $ 326,105
Exceeds $250,000 (Is it flagged?): Yes
Start and End Dates: 5/1/23 - 4/30/26
Restricted Research: YES
Academic Discipline: Psychology
Department, Center, School, or Institute: Psychology
Title of Contract, Award, or Gift: SBP: Neurocognitive Mechanisms in the Perception of Race
Name of Granting or Contracting Agency/Entity:
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
CFDA Link: NSF
47.075
Program Title:
Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences
CFDA Linked: Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences
Note:
Race is an important dimension that people categorize others by, which influences downstream evaluations, stereotypes, and expectations for behavior. Although early research suggested people categorize faces by race spontaneously and immediately, more recent research has posited a process of racial categorization—named person construal—that integrates both bottom-up (stimulus driven) and top-down (perceiver or context driven) factors over time to roduce a racial representation of a face. The existence of this iterative process has important implications for how we understand the perception and construction of race, as perceivers’ motivations, prior experience, and racial context can shape how a face is classified racially, especially when bottom-up information (e.g., skin tone, shape of facial features) is ambiguous. Because of the importance of race as an attribute by which people group themselves and others, people attend to racial information in faces extremely early in the perceptual process (within 200 milliseconds of seeing a face). However, it is currently unclear how exactly this early attention to race contributes to how faces are ultimately racially categorized and the consequences of those categorizations. Two lab-based studies are proposed to measure quickly occurring and distinct neurocognitive processes with EEG while racial categorization of Black, White, and Latino faces unfolds. Study 1 will test the possibility that early attention to racial cues contributes to racial categorization by facilitating faster accumulation of racial information, as measured by motor response preparation of categorization responses. Study 2 will examine the role of racial context by leveraging unique properties of the study location (majority Latino community on the U.S.-Mexico border) to examine how inority/majority status of a racial group influences race perception. Results from these studies will shed light on how bottom-up and top-down factors shape race perception, which has downstream implications for interpersonal intergroup behavior, including prejudice and discrimination.
Discussion: No discussion notes