ABSTRACT
N170 suggestive of race-based encoding differences map onto actual
memory performance.5
This review has highlighted racial modulations in a number of different
components. Because these components have been associated with different
psychological processes and manifest at different time points, differing
effects provide insight into distinct operations that may underlie social
categorization. One important issue for future research is understanding
precisely what these effects in ERP components means. This review reveals
race effects on the P200 and N200 to be highly reliable (e.g., occurring across
tasks) and generalizable (e.g., occurring among participants and to targets of
different races). Effects in these two components often covary (e.g., larger
P200s to Blacks is usually accompanied by larger N200s to Whites), but they
are sometimes dissociated. In Kubota and Ito (2007), for instance,
simultaneously regressing race differences in N100, P200, and N200 on
racial categorization speed revealed an independent effect only for N200 race
differences. In Kubota (2010) and Tanaka and Pierce (2009), the effects of
individuating manipulations were restricted to the N200/N250. In Kubota,
race differences were still observed in the earlier P200. These dissociations
may be revealing interesting information about the time course of
individuating processes, and might be productively exploited in future
research to better understand how and why race impacts subsequent
judgements. Another question raised by this research is how the race effects seen in the
P200 and N200 relate to those seen in the N170. As just noted, P200 and
N200 race effects are quite consistent in both their presence and direction of
effect. Moreover, a hallmark of these effects is their automatic nature,
manifesting across a range of task manipulations. By contrast, the effects of
race on the N170 have been quite variable (for reviews, see Ito & Bartholow,
2009; Senholzi & Ito, 2012), with recent evidence indicating they are sensitive
to task manipulations (Senholzi & Ito, 2012). Why are some race effects so
stable and others quite malleable? How do these effects relate to each other
5While the focus of this review is on early perceptual differentiation between racial ingroup
and outgroup faces, we note that some studies have investigated more sustained differences that
occur during encoding in ORE tasks. Effects in an ERP response called the Dm, or difference
due to memory, which reflects encoding that differentiates subsequently remembered from
forgotten faces over longer time periods (e.g., 3001000 ms after stimulus onset) have been examined for ingroup and outgroup faces. Results have been quite variable across studies and
subjects of different races (Herzmann et al., 2011; Lucas et al., 2011). As a result, it is not yet
clear how encoding differences that occur slightly later in processing relate to the ORE.
