Brain Reacts Differently to Faces Based on Race: “People have been found to remember faces of their own race

better than they remember faces of other races. Now researchers may have uncovered the

changes in the brain that underlie that phenomenon.

Dr. Jennifer L. Eberhardt and colleagues from Stanford University in California asked 19 men–9

black and 10 white–to look at pictures of faces of people from both races while they monitored

participants’ brain activity with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The investigators found that when the study participants looked at faces matching their own race, a

specific area of the brain ‘lit up’ on the MRI. But when they looked at pictures of faces of another

race, the brain area did not activate to the same degree, according to the report in the August

issue of Nature Neuroscience.” I’ve previously covered other evidence that this brain region, the fusiform gyrus, processes face recognition only and that this data is processed inherently differently from object recognition. For example, one of the clues to the social interaction impairment of autistic patients is that they seem to process the perception of other people as if they were objects. I think what this current study is saying is not that we are neurologically programmed to process the faces of other races differently, but that when our biases and preconceptions dictate that we approach the Other as an object, it is even reflected in basic neurological processes. It would be interesting to see whether distinctions around the degree of objectification of women by various men would also be reflected on fMRI. Reuters