Effects of Human Race and Face Inversion on the N170

Abstract

To learn whether the N170 would be differentially affected by orientation inversion of same- and other-race faces, we recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in Caucasian and locally resident Asian subjects viewing upright and upside-down front-view photographs of African, Asian, and Caucasian faces. Results show that the time-to-peak was significantly delayed for inverted Caucasian faces in both subject groups. The same-race N170 peaked later than either other-race N170 in the Caucasian, but showed no significant difference between Caucasian and Asian faces in the Asian participants. Inversion, therefore, appears to affect the N170’s latency predominantly for faces of familiar races. This conclusion gains support from a positive correlation between the latency of the N170 evoked by both upright and inverted Caucasian faces and the amount of time that the Asian participants had lived in Europe. The N170’s race- and inversion-dependent latency increase may, thus, express an impairment of processing that emphasizes individuation of familiar-race faces, and develops during familiarization.

Other-race and inversion effects during the structural encoding stage of face processing in a race categorization task: An event-related brain potential study

“…N170 amplitudes were similar for the three races of faces when presented in the inverted orientation). More precisely, in line with previous findings (Gajewski et al, 2008;Herrmann et al, 2007;Stahl et al, 2008;Walker et al, Fig. 2.…”

“…In contrast, Caldara et al (2004) identified the occurrence of the OR advantage in categorization at around 240 ms, a stage related to the processing of visual information at the semantic level. In addition, some authors found that inversion affects the latency (Gajewski et al, 2008) or the amplitude (Vizioli et al, 2010) of the N170 predominantly for faces from the same race of the participants, while others found that the effects of race and inversion are additive and do not interact (Wiese et al, 2009). Thus, it is yet unclear at the present time whether the ORE is based on differential configural/holistic information processing at the time of the initial face-encoding stage.…”

“…Given that amplitude and/or latency enhancement of the N170 tends to reflect the difficulty in configural/holistic information processing when faces are inverted Rossion, 2009, 2010;Rossion et al, 2000), the investigation of this component appears justified to examine the ORE. However, no consistent race effects on either amplitude or latency of the N170 component has emerged so far (Caldara et al, 2003(Caldara et al, , 2004Gajewski et al, 2008;Herrmann et al, 2007;Ito et al, 2004;Ito and Urland, 2005;James et al, 2001;Stahl et al, 2008;Walker et al, 2007;Wiese et al, 2009), probably due to the wide range of task demands and the use of different ethnic groups as face stimuli. While certain researchers (Herrmann et al, 2007;Walker et al, 2007) reported an increase in the classical N170 face-sensitive component at occipito-temporal electrodes for OR (Asian or African) faces relative to SR faces in Caucasian participants during non-social categorization tasks, 3 others (Ito and Urland, 2005) found the opposite (i.e.…”

“…To address these objectives, behavioral and electrophysiological data were recorded in Caucasian participants performing a race categorization task with Caucasian, African, and Asian faces, instead of two used in most ERP studies (Caldara et al, 2003(Caldara et al, , 2004Herrmann et al, 2007;Ito et al, 2004;Ito and Urland, 2005;James et al, 2001;Stahl et al, 2008;Walker et al, 2007;Wiese et al, 2009). The race categorization task appeared to be particularly relevant because race modulation of the N170 appears to depend on task demands (Ito and Urland, 2005) and previous researchers investigated the N170 sensitivity to race in the framework of the FIE by using tasks for which race information was irrelevant (Gajewski et al, 2008;Vizioli et al, 2010;Wiese et al, 2009). Finally, given the findings of greater inversion effects for SR compared to OR faces (Fallshore and Schooler, 1995;Hancock and Rhodes, 2008;Rhodes et al, 1989;Sangrigoli and de Schonen, 2004), indicating a higher level of configural/holistic information processing for faces of the observer's own race (Michel et al, 2006a,b;Tanaka et al, 2004), our main hypotheses were that the N170 component is influenced by ethnic groups and should be differentially modulated by inversion as a function of the race of faces.…”

ERP evidence for own-age effects on late stages of processing sad faces

“…Some previous studies have revealed increased N170 amplitudes for other-race than for own-race faces (Caharel et al, 2011;Gajewski, Schlegel, & Stoerig, 2008;Herrmann et al, 2007;Stahl, Wiese, & Schweinberger, 2008;Walker, Silvert, Hewstone, & Nobre, 2007;Wiese, 2012;Wiese, Kaufmann, & Schweinberger, 2014). Since own-race and own-age effects on ERPs are partly comparable (Ebner, He, Fichtenholtz, McCarthy, & Johnson, 2011;Wiese, Schweinberger, & Hansen, 2008), this finding might extend to own-age effects.…”