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Facing up to stereotypes

Nature Neuroscience volume 19, pages 763–764 (2016)Cite this article

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Our understanding of faces reflects both our perception of their facial features and our social knowledge. This interaction of stereotypes and vision can be observed in brain signals in fusiform gyrus and orbitofrontal cortex.

Walking on the sidewalk on a busy day, we can pass hundreds of faces, each of them unique and constantly changing. A face can tell us much about a person, including who they are, how they feel, even what they are attending to. Our ability to extract this information is supported by a network of brain regions that analyze different features of a face and help us form a coherent percept of the person. But this percept is more than just the physical features of the face: it also reflects our prior knowledge and associations of social categories, or stereotypes. These stereotypes facilitate—and often oversimplify—the way we perceive our social world and may cause separate social categories to become related. For example, faces of one race may be more associated with negative facial expressions1. Are these stereotypes an interpretation of an unbiased visual representation of a face, or does our social knowledge shape the way we process the visual information itself?

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Figure 1: Mapping stereotype responses to brain activity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Martin N. Hebart and Chris I. Baker are in the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.,

    Martin N Hebart & Chris I Baker

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  1. Martin N Hebart
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  2. Chris I Baker
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Correspondence to Martin N Hebart or Chris I Baker.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Hebart, M., Baker, C. Facing up to stereotypes. Nat Neurosci 19, 763–764 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4309

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