Seeing Race: N170 Responses to Race and Their Relation to Automatic Racial Attitudes and Controlled Processing Renana H. Ofan, Nava Rubin, and David M. Amodio Abstract ■ We examined the relation between neural activity reflecting early face perception processes and automatic and controlled re- sponses to race. Participants completed a sequential evaluative priming task, in which two-tone images of Black faces, White faces, and cars appeared as primes, followed by target words categorized as pleasant or unpleasant, while encephalography was recorded. Half of these participants were alerted that the task assessed racial prejudice and could reveal their personal bias (“alerted” condition). To assess face perception processes, the N170 component of the ERP was examined. For all participants, stronger automatic pro-White bias was associated with larger N170 amplitudes to Black than White faces. For participants in the alerted condition only, larger N170 amplitudes to Black ver- sus White faces were also associated with less controlled pro- cessing on the word categorization task. These findings suggest that preexisting racial attitudes affect early face processing and that situational factors moderate the link between early face pro- cessing and behavior. ■ INTRODUCTION Human social interactions often begin with the perception of a face—a process accomplished in as little as 170 msec (Bentin, Allison, Puce, Perez, & McCarthy, 1996). Yet the way we perceive a face within a social interaction may be influenced by prior knowledge about social categories and the motivations we bring into the situation (Eberhardt, Dasgupta, & Banaszynski, 2003). In the present research, we examined how previously learned associations with race may influence the earliest stages of visual face pro- cessing and how these effects may have implications for the control of behavioral responses. Perceiving Faces The initial perception of a face entails a rapid and con- certed set of processes. One of the earliest processes in- volves the structural encoding of face components into a cohesive and meaningful object (i.e., a face). This encod- ing process has been associated with a component of the ERP called the N170, a negative polarity neuroelectric sig- nal that occurs just 170 msec after the presentation of a face and is most pronounced at right occipito-temporal scalp sites (Bentin et al., 1996). This N170 component re- flects activity in multiple occipito-temporal structures linked to face processing (Deffke et al., 2007), including the fusiform and other temporal regions (Herrmann, Ehlis, Muehlberger, & Fallgatter, 2005), consistent with fMRI stud- ies indicating the involvement of the fusiform gyrus in face processing (e.g., Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000; Puce, Allison, Gore, & McCarthy, 1995). These studies reveal that faces are processed very quickly and at relatively early stages in the hierarchy of visual processing. Although the N170 is consistently responsive to faces, the psychological significance of this effect remains a mat- ter of some debate. For example, the N170 amplitude is larger in response to clear upright faces of conspecifics than to nonface stimuli, suggesting that it reflects a face- specific response. Interestingly, when comparing re- sponses to different types of faces, the N170 is often larger in response to inverted faces and faces of close heterospe- cifics than to upright human faces (de Haan, Pascalis, & Johnson, 2002; Rossion et al., 2000). In this case, an in- verted face constitutes a deviation from typical faces, in the sense that it contains the same components but in a different orientation than is normally encountered. Along these lines, Halit, de Haan, and Johnson (2000) found that atypical and unattractive faces elicit larger N170 ampli- tudes, compared with normative faces, in a passive viewing task. 1 These findings suggest that, when comparing N170 amplitudes associated with different faces, a larger relative N170 amplitude may reflect additional processing involved in the perception of a face that deviates from oneʼs norma- tive representation of a face. Influences of Race on Face Perception Behavioral studies of face perception have shown that race is identified rapidly (Blair, Judd, & Fallman, 2004), suggest- ing that racial information may influence early stages of visual processing. Race effects on face perception have also been examined by measuring the N170 component New York University © 2011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23:10, pp. 3153–3161