Elsevier

Neuroscience Letters

Volume 397, Issue 3, 24 April 2006, Pages 279-284
Neuroscience Letters

Racial distinction of the unknown facial identity recognition mechanism by event-related fMRI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2005.12.061Get rights and content

Abstract

A body of evidence exists indicating that the function of the fusiform area of the face is selectively involved in the perception of faces, and in particular, in perceiving racial differences. In the present study, we investigated the neural substrates of the face-selective region (the fusiform face area, FFA) in the ventral occipital-temporal cortex and examined their role in case of same-racial face recognition by employing event-related fMRI. Twelve healthy subjects (Oriental-Koreans) performed the familiarity judgment tasks while they were being presented with familiar and unknown faces of Oriental-Koreans and Caucasian-Americans. The results indicate that there are significant differences in perceiving unfamiliar faces between Oriental-Koreans and Caucasian-Americans in the FFA, whereas no significant difference was found between familiar Oriental-Korean and Caucasian-American faces in the same area. This suggests that an effect of same-race superiority exists when the perceived identity is only unfamiliar. The neural responses to Oriental-Koreans versus Caucasian-Americans in Oriental-Korean subjects likely reflect cultural evaluations of social groups as modified by individual experience.

Section snippets

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by grants of the Korea Health 21 R&D Project, Ministry of Health & Welfare, Republic of Korea (02-PJ1-PG1-CH06-0001), (02-PJ3-PG6-EV07-0002) and a grant of the 2005 Nuclear R&D Plan Program, Ministry of Science & Technology, Korea.

We thank two anonymous referees for helpful suggestions on a previous version of this manuscript.

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