Black and Latiné Faces Capture Early Attention Measured by the P2 ERP Component: Departure From Whiteness as a Source of Salience

ABSTRACT

Social interactions are shaped by rapid perception of others' racial group membership, which influences downstream judgments and behavior. Event‐related potentials (ERPs) provide a method for examining how attention is allocated to race‐related cues at very early stages of face perception. Prior research has shown that White perceivers attend more to Black faces than White faces, as indexed by the P2 component, but theoretical explanations of this effect are limited by over‐reliance on White participants and limited consideration of how race perception operates within a racial hierarchy. Here, we expand prior research by recruiting Latiné undergraduate participants ( N  = 93) and expanding face stimuli to include Black, Latiné, and White faces that varied in terms of racial prototypicality (i.e., racially ambiguous faces were included). Replicating prior findings, Black faces elicited larger P2 amplitudes than both White faces and Latiné faces. Multilevel modeling of single‐trial ERPs also found that racial prototypicality moderated P2 responses to each face, such that higher prototypicality predicted larger P2 amplitudes for Black and Latiné faces but not White faces. Self‐reports of how threatened perceivers felt by each racial group did not account for these effects. Last, larger trial‐level P2 amplitudes predicted faster categorization responses, but only for highly prototypical faces. Findings suggest that early attention is preferentially allocated to faces with high potential for non‐White racial classification and that this attentional prioritization facilitates racial categorization only when visual cues are more racially prototypical.