Predominance of eyes and surface information for face race categorization

Faces can be categorized in various ways, for example as male or female or as belonging to a specific biogeographic ancestry (race). Here we tested the importance of the main facial features for race perception. We exchanged inner facial features (eyes, mouth or nose), face contour (everything but those) or texture (surface information) between Asian and Caucasian faces. Features were exchanged one at a time, creating for each Asian/Caucasian face pair ten facial variations of the original face pair. German and Korean participants performed a race classification task on all faces presented in random order. The results show that eyes and texture are major determinants of perceived biogeographic ancestry for both groups of participants and for both face types. Inserting these features in a face of another race changed its perceived biogeographic ancestry. Contour, nose and mouth, in that order, had decreasing and much weaker influence on race perception for both participant groups. Exchanging those features did not induce a change of perceived biogeographic ancestry. In our study, all manipulated features were imbedded in natural looking faces, which were shown in an off-frontal view. Our findings confirm and extend previous studies investigating the importance of various facial features for race perception.

Defying the Monolingual Stage / Bousculer la scène unilingue

In early April 2017, Toronto’s Modern Times Theatre invited a diverse group of artists, scholars, and critics to join a discussion about diversity in Canadian theatre practices. One of the panels moderated by the Artistic Director of Cahoots Theatre, Marjorie Chan, focused on languages and accents on stage. Each of the discussants proposed their own set of questions: How can minority languages be represented on stage? Should they be translated? What is the role of subtitles and what kind of sub/surtitles should be used? Who is allowed to use which language? For instance, can hearing actors use ASL on stage or should they let deaf actors perform roles that require ASL? Should immigrant actors who learned English as adults be expected to speak English without a marked accent? Why do Canadian audiences and critics find it difficult to accept “non-native sounding” actors performing characters that are expected to have an “unmarked” accent? Why are they expected to have an “unmarked accent”? While the discussants did not see eye to eye on many of these issues, it was clear that they all shared the view that professional Canadian theatre companies and Canadian theatre schools are currently doing a rather poor job at fostering linguistic and phonetic diversity on stage. It also became clear that the question of using multiple languages on stage is profoundly intertwined with the question of accents, dialects, the issues of accent/language perception, as well as race and race perception, the problem of power distribution, and, last but not least, the aesthetic choices of every single production.

Sedimentation of Habits and Orienting Experiences

Chapter 4 pivots around experiences of race, and explores social and cultural habitation to sensory perceptions and meanings. It discusses the sensorium of race perception beyond the visual, and provides historical and cultural examples of how perceiving bodily Others emerges in and is maintained by sensory experiences. It explores how understanding our orientations and perspectives on the world as fundamentally embedded in and emerging from our bodily manner of existence allows us to begin grasping how it is not reason or intellectual reflection alone by which we can address perceptual alignments that might appear problematic to us. Habits and socio-cultural practices are not simply matters of belief or conviction held in a disembodied mind, but are embedded within our bodily perceptual orientation.

The Impact of Childhood Experience on Amygdala Response to Perceptually Familiar Black and White Faces

Given the well-documented involvement of the amygdala in race perception, the current study aimed to investigate how interracial contact during childhood shapes amygdala response to racial outgroup members in adulthood. Of particular interest was the impact of childhood experience on amygdala response to familiar, compared with novel, Black faces. Controlling for a number of well-established individual difference measures related to interracial attitudes, the results reveal that perceivers with greater childhood exposure to racial outgroup members display greater relative reduction in amygdala response to familiar Black faces. The implications of such findings are discussed in the context of previous investigations into the neural substrates of race perception and in consideration of potential mechanisms by which childhood experience may shape race perception.