The race of an individual is a salient physical feature that is rapidly processed by the brain and can bias our perceptions of others. How the race of others explicitly impacts our actions toward them during intergroup contexts is not well understood. In the current study, we examined how task-irrelevant race information influences cognitive control in a go/no-go task in a community sample of Black (n = 54) and White (n = 51) participants. We examined the neural correlates of behavioral effects using functional magnetic resonance imaging and explored the influence of implicit racial attitudes on brain-behavior associations. Both Black and White participants showed more cognitive control failures, as indexed by dprime, to Black versus White faces, despite the irrelevance of race to the task demands. This behavioral pattern was paralleled by greater activity to Black faces in the fusiform face area, implicated in processing face and in-group information, and lateral orbitofrontal cortex, associated with resolving stimulus-response conflict. Exploratory brain-behavior associations suggest different patterns in Black and White individuals. Black participants exhibited a negative association between fusiform activity and response time during impulsive errors to Black faces, whereas White participants showed a positive association between lateral OFC activity and cognitive control performance to Black faces when accounting for implicit racial associations. Together our findings propose that attention to race information is associated with diminished cognitive control that may be driven by different mechanisms for Black and White individuals.

个人的种族是一个显着的身体特征，它会被大脑快速处理，并可能使我们对他人的看法产生偏差。在群体间的背景下，他人的种族如何明确影响我们对他们的行为尚不清楚。在当前的研究中，我们研究了与任务无关的种族信息如何影响黑人（n = 54）和白人（n = 51）参与者的社区样本中进行/不进行任务的认知控制。我们使用功能磁共振成像检查了行为效应的神经相关性，并探讨了隐性种族态度对大脑行为关联的影响。尽管种族与任务要求无关，但根据 dprime 的索引，黑人和白人参与者在黑人与白人面孔上都表现出更多的认知控制失败。这种行为模式与黑人面孔的梭状面部区域和外侧眶额皮层的更大活动相平行，该区域涉及处理面部和群体内信息，以及外侧眶额皮层，与解决刺激反应冲突有关。探索性的大脑行为关联表明黑人和白人有不同的模式。黑人参与者在对黑人面孔做出冲动性错误时表现出梭状活动与反应时间之间呈负相关，而白人参与者在考虑隐性种族关联时表现出横向 OFC 活动与对黑人面孔的认知控制表现之间呈正相关。我们的研究结果表明，对种族信息的关注与认知控制的减弱有关，这可能是由黑人和白人的不同机制驱动的。