Racial socioeconomic gaps are widened in periods of economic recession. Besides social and institutional factors, black people also struggle with many psychological factors. The literature reports racial-biased complex behaviors and high-level processes that are influenced by economic scarcity. A previous study found a bias at the perceptual level: an experimental manipulation of scarcity (a subliminal priming paradigm) lowered the black-white race categorization threshold. Here we present a conceptual replication in a higher ecological setup. In our main analysis we compared the categorization threshold of participants that received the Brazilian government’s emergency economic aid in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic ( n = 136) and participants that did not receive the economic aid ( n = 135) in an online psychophysical task that presented faces in a black-white race continuum . Additionally, we analyzed the economic impact of COVID-19 on household income, and in cases of family unemployment. Our results do not support the claim that perception of race is influenced by economic scarcity. Interestingly, we found that when people differ greatly in terms of racial prejudice, they encode visual information related to race differently. People with higher scores on a prejudice scale needed more phenotypic traits of the black race to categorize a face as black. We discuss the results in terms of differences in method and sample.
Objective: The uncanny valley hypothesis refers to a subjective experience of eeriness to highly human-like objects (e.g., realistic avatars). There is evidence that objects at the human-avatar category boundary along the dimension of human likeness (DHL) are more likely to evoke the uncanny valley effect. Literature has focused on the affective domain of the phenomenon and studies on the cognitive demands are few. Here, we investigate whether perceptual ambiguity could affect the hierarchical processing of facial features. Our study investigated categorical perception of female and male faces along the DHL. Method: Participants performed a real vs. artificial categorization task and behavioral measures (categorization threshold and response time; RT) were calculated to determine avatar, boundary, and human face conditions. Results: An analysis on the hierarchy of gaze dwell time in regions of interest (ROI; eyes, nose, and mouth) showed greater dwell time for the nose area of boundary faces compared to the nose area of avatar and human faces. Conclusions: Results showed that perceptual discrimination difficulty changed the allocation of attentional resources in boundary faces. Such output may contribute on how we process artificial faces and might improve users' experiences from highly realistic characters. Public Significance StatementThe uncanny valley effect is a subjective experience of eeriness to highly human-like avatars. There is evidence that human-avatar ambiguous characters are more likely to evoke the uncanny valley effect. Perceptual discrimination difficulty changes how attention is allocated for human-avatar ambiguous faces. Such result is relevant for researchers interested in how we interact with artificial faces, and for graphics developers concerned on how to improve users' experiences from their highly realistic characters.
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