Ran Guangming, Zhang Qi, Chen Xu, Pan Yangu
Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University (SWU), Chongqing, 400715, China; Research Center of Mental Health Education, Southwest University (SWU), Chongqing, 400715, China.
School of Education Science, Guizhou Normal University (GNU), Guizhou, 550001, China.
PLoS One. 2014 Nov 25;9(11):e114011. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0114011. eCollection 2014.
Human beings do not passively perceive important social features about others such as race and age in social interactions. Instead, it is proposed that humans might continuously generate predictions about these social features based on prior similar experiences. Pre-awareness of racial information conveyed by others' faces enables individuals to act in "culturally appropriate" ways, which is useful for interpersonal relations in different ethnicity groups. However, little is known about the effects of prediction on the perception for own-race and other-race faces. Here, we addressed this issue using high temporal resolution event-related potential techniques. In total, data from 24 participants (13 women and 11 men) were analyzed. It was found that the N170 amplitudes elicited by other-race faces, but not own-race faces, were significantly smaller in the predictable condition compared to the unpredictable condition, reflecting a switch to holistic processing of other-race faces when those faces were predictable. In this respect, top-down prediction about face race might contribute to the elimination of the other-race effect (one face recognition impairment). Furthermore, smaller P300 amplitudes were observed for the predictable than for unpredictable conditions, which suggested that the prediction of race reduced the neural responses of human brains.
在社交互动中，人类并非被动地感知他人的重要社会特征，如种族和年龄。相反，有人提出，人类可能会根据先前的类似经历，不断对这些社会特征进行预测。对他人面部所传达的种族信息的预认知，使个体能够以“文化上合适”的方式行事，这对不同种族群体的人际关系很有用。然而，关于预测对本种族和其他种族面孔感知的影响，我们却知之甚少。在这里，我们使用高时间分辨率的事件相关电位技术解决了这个问题。总共分析了来自24名参与者（13名女性和11名男性）的数据。结果发现，与不可预测的情况相比，在可预测的情况下，其他种族面孔而非本种族面孔引发的N170波幅显著更小，这反映出当这些面孔可预测时，对其他种族面孔的加工转向了整体加工。在这方面，关于面孔种族的自上而下的预测可能有助于消除其他种族效应（一种面孔识别障碍）。此外，可预测情况下观察到的P300波幅比不可预测情况下更小，这表明种族预测降低了人类大脑的神经反应。
