TY - JOUR
T1 - Processing of Task-Irrelevant Race Information is Associated with Diminished Cognitive Control in Black and White Individuals
AU - Rubien-Thomas, Estée
AU - Berrian, Nia
AU - Cervera, Alessandra
AU - Nardos, Binyam
AU - Cohen, Alexandra O.
AU - Lowrey, Ariel
AU - Daumeyer, Natalie M.
AU - Camp, Nicholas P.
AU - Hughes, Brent L.
AU - Eberhardt, Jennifer L.
AU - Taylor-Thompson, Kim A.
AU - Fair, Damien A.
AU - Richeson, Jennifer A.
AU - Casey, B. J.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships (E.R.-T.) and a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to Vanderbilt University. Its contents reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of either the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation or the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience ( www.lawneuro.org ).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).
PY - 2021/6
Y1 - 2021/6
N2 - The race of an individual is a salient physical feature that is rapidly processed by the brain and can bias our perceptions of others. How the race of others explicitly impacts our actions toward them during intergroup contexts is not well understood. In the current study, we examined how task-irrelevant race information influences cognitive control in a go/no-go task in a community sample of Black (n = 54) and White (n = 51) participants. We examined the neural correlates of behavioral effects using functional magnetic resonance imaging and explored the influence of implicit racial attitudes on brain-behavior associations. Both Black and White participants showed more cognitive control failures, as indexed by dprime, to Black versus White faces, despite the irrelevance of race to the task demands. This behavioral pattern was paralleled by greater activity to Black faces in the fusiform face area, implicated in processing face and in-group information, and lateral orbitofrontal cortex, associated with resolving stimulus-response conflict. Exploratory brain-behavior associations suggest different patterns in Black and White individuals. Black participants exhibited a negative association between fusiform activity and response time during impulsive errors to Black faces, whereas White participants showed a positive association between lateral OFC activity and cognitive control performance to Black faces when accounting for implicit racial associations. Together our findings propose that attention to race information is associated with diminished cognitive control that may be driven by different mechanisms for Black and White individuals.
AB - The race of an individual is a salient physical feature that is rapidly processed by the brain and can bias our perceptions of others. How the race of others explicitly impacts our actions toward them during intergroup contexts is not well understood. In the current study, we examined how task-irrelevant race information influences cognitive control in a go/no-go task in a community sample of Black (n = 54) and White (n = 51) participants. We examined the neural correlates of behavioral effects using functional magnetic resonance imaging and explored the influence of implicit racial attitudes on brain-behavior associations. Both Black and White participants showed more cognitive control failures, as indexed by dprime, to Black versus White faces, despite the irrelevance of race to the task demands. This behavioral pattern was paralleled by greater activity to Black faces in the fusiform face area, implicated in processing face and in-group information, and lateral orbitofrontal cortex, associated with resolving stimulus-response conflict. Exploratory brain-behavior associations suggest different patterns in Black and White individuals. Black participants exhibited a negative association between fusiform activity and response time during impulsive errors to Black faces, whereas White participants showed a positive association between lateral OFC activity and cognitive control performance to Black faces when accounting for implicit racial associations. Together our findings propose that attention to race information is associated with diminished cognitive control that may be driven by different mechanisms for Black and White individuals.
KW - Attention
KW - Cognitive control
KW - Face perception
KW - Implicit bias
KW - Race
KW - fMRI
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85105415875&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3758/s13415-021-00896-8
DO - 10.3758/s13415-021-00896-8
M3 - Article
C2 - 33942274
AN - SCOPUS:85105415875
SN - 1530-7026
VL - 21
SP - 625
EP - 638
JO - Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience
JF - Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience
IS - 3
ER -