Exogenous attention allows the automatic detection of relevant stimuli and the reorientation of our current focus of attention towards them. Faces from an ethnic outgroup tend to capture exogenous attention to a greater extent than faces from an ethnic ingroup. We explored whether prejudice toward the outgroup, rather than lack of familiarity, is driving this effect. Participants (N = 76) performed a digit categorization task while distractor faces were presented. Faces belonged to (i) a prejudiced outgroup, (ii) a non-prejudiced outgroup and (iii) their ingroup. Half of the faces were previously habituated in order to increase their familiarity. Reaction times, accuracy and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to index exogenous attention to distractor faces. Additionally, different indexes of explicit and implicit prejudice were measured, the latter being significantly greater towards prejudiced outgroup. N170 amplitude was greater to prejudiced outgroup—regardless of their habituation status—than to both non-prejudiced outgroup and ingroup faces and was associated with implicit prejudice measures. No effects were observed at the behavioral level. Our results show that implicit prejudice, rather than familiarity, is under the observed attention-related N170 effects and that this ERP component may be more sensitive to prejudice than behavioral measures under certain circumstances.

中文翻译：

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偏见驱使人们对外来群体进行外来关注。


外源注意力可以自动检测相关刺激，并将我们当前的注意力焦点重新定位到这些刺激上。来自外族裔群体的面孔比来自内族裔群体的面孔更容易吸引外来注意力。我们探讨了这种效应是否是由对外群体的偏见而不是缺乏熟悉感造成的。参与者（ N = 76）在呈现干扰性面孔的同时执行数字分类任务。面孔属于（i）有偏见的外群体，（ii）无偏见的外群体和（iii）他们的内群体。一半的面孔之前已经习惯了，为了增加熟悉感。记录反应时间、准确性和事件相关电位（ERP），以索引对干扰面孔的外源注意力。此外，还测量了显性和隐性偏见的不同指数，后者对有偏见的外群体显着更大。带有偏见的外群体（无论其习惯状态如何）的 N170 振幅比无偏见的外群体和内群体面孔的 N170 幅度更大，并且与隐性偏见测量相关。在行为水平上没有观察到影响。我们的结果表明，在观察到的与注意相关的 N170 效应中，隐性偏见而不是熟悉性存在，并且在某些情况下，该 ERP 组件可能比行为测量对偏见更敏感。