• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.95-107
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• 2022

Facial processing of different racial origin has been investigated at various levels including perceptual, emotional, and socio-cultural processing. Particularly, a good deal of studies have been conducted to show "other race effect (ORE)" to indicate that subtle facial information such as identity or emotional expressions are often under-processed in racial out-group members. However, few studies have investigated whether attentional modulation toward racial out-group faces could explain ORE. We investigated whether novelty-driven attentional mechanism is involved in face perception using event-related potential (ERP). Twenty-two Korean (KR) and nine Caucasian-American (AM) participants were presented with emotional faces from the two racial origins while they performed a gender categorization task. KRs showed significantly greater P3 amplitudes to AM than to KR faces indicating that the early attentional processing underlies differential perception of racial out-group faces. Interestingly, P3 was not up-regulated in the AM subjects when they were presented with KR faces, perhaps due to massive habituation to KR faces during everyday social interaction. These results indicate that racial out-group faces are highly salient stimuli which automatically occupy attentional resources, but easily habituated with repeated exposure to the racial-out group.