The Impact Of Task Requirements On Ethnic Face Processing

People are more accurate at remembering faces of their own racial group rather than of another race.Recent behavioral studies have found that when task demands focus on racial categorization-level information,other-race faces are categorized faster than own-race faces;whereas when task demands focus on individual-level information,memory is more accurate for own-race faces than for other-race faces.The present study used ERP to test whether these two level task demands influence of own-and other-race faces perception and attention bias.The first experiment using the learning task and race categorization task,found that the task demands modulated the N170 and P2,which indicated the larger N170 and P2 amplitudes in the individuallevel task relative to the race-level task.The second experiment using 1-back paradigm with race categorization and individuation task demands,which found larger N170 amplitude for other-race faces relative to own-race faces in the individual task demand over the right hemisphere,whereas larger N170 amplitude for other-race faces in the categorization task demand over left hemisphere.And larger P2 for ownrace faces in the individual task demand,whereas larger P2 for other-race faces in the categorization task demand.Also larger P200 was observed in the categorization task demand for other-race faces.However,there no other race or task demand modulation effect were observed for P200 and N200.Overall,the present findings suggest that the early encoding strategy for other-race faces were modulated by the task demands which based on the race-level or identity-level.Moreover,the attention and cognitive resource were re-allocated according to encoding strategy for both ethnic faces in the later processing stage.