Brain Reacts Differently
To Faces Based On Race
Excerpt By Emma Hitt, PhD

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - 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.

``Our prediction was that you would get greater activation in these areas for same-race faces compared to other-race faces,'' Eberhardt told Reuters Health. ``This is what we found, and the results were pretty similar among the groups of participants.''

The part of the brain that the researchers targeted is called the fusiform region. ``It is an area that is activated when someone looks at a face, but not while they look at other objects or even other parts of the body,'' Eberhardt explained.

``It is also activated when a person looks at an object about which they are an expert,'' Eberhardt said, noting that a bird watcher's fusiform region might be activated if he looks at a bird.

In another test designed to measure the participants' ability to recall whether they had seen a picture before, the individuals were asked to look at pictures of both races. Then some of the pictures were shown to them again, but were mixed with some pictures that they had not seen before.

According to the researchers, African-American participants did well in recalling whether they had previously seen a face, regardless of race--although the best memory performance in the study was among black participants looking at black faces.

Whites, however, were not as successful in recalling which pictures of African Americans they had seen before, the report indicates.

``I'd like to do studies where we will look at how this phenomenon is represented in other races and how people come to know race,'' Eberhardt said. ``It would be good to look at this phenomenon cross-culturally.''

SOURCE: Nature Neuroscience 2001;4:845-850.

Reference Source 89

For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use
PreventDisease.com's "Quick Prevention Resources".