Own-race faces capture attention faster than other-race faces: evidence from response time and the N2pc

Open Access peer reviewed research article.Studies have shown that people are better at recognizing human faces from their own-race than from other-races, an effect often termed the Own-Race Advantage. The current study investigates whether there is an Own-Race Advantage in attention and its neural correlates. Participants were asked to search for a human face among animal faces. Experiment 1 showed a classic Own-Race Advantage in response time both for Chinese and Black South African participants. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), Experiment 2 showed a similar Own-Race Advantage in response time for both upright faces and inverted faces. Moreover, the latency of N2pc for own-race faces was earlier than that for other-race faces. These results suggested that own-race faces capture attention more efficiently than other-race faces.This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31170978) to GZ, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31100739, 31470978) to ZY, the Ministry of Education of China (10YJCXLX055) to ZY, and the Major Program of the National Social Science Foundation of China (14ZDB015)