One of us? how facial and symbolic cues to own- versus other-race membership influence access to perceptual awareness

Abstract

Information that conveys racial group membership plays a powerful role in influencing people s information processing including perceptual, memory and evaluative judgments. Yet whether own- and other-race information can differentially impact people s perceptual awareness at a preconscious level remains unclear. Employing a breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm, we investigated whether compared with other-race stimuli, participants own-race stimuli would be prioritized to gain privileged access to perceptual awareness. Across five experiments (N\u202f=\u202f136), we firstly found that participants own-race faces enjoyed privileged access to perceptual awareness (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2-5, we employed an associative training task to establish associations between otherwise arbitrary visual stimuli and own- vs. other-racial groups. Although otherwise arbitrary visual stimuli were prioritized to represent one s own race (vs. other-race) during the training, own- and other-race representing stimuli did not differ in their potency in entering perceptual awareness. This dissociation was further corroborated by Bayesian analyses and an internal meta-analysis. Taken together, our findings suggest that people s perceptual expertise with their own-race members faces plays a determining role in shaping perceptual awareness. In contrast, newly learned race-representing stimuli did not influence early perceptual selection processes as indicated by the time they take to emerge into perceptual awareness.