Mapping the impact of culture and race in visual processing

Human beings living in different geographical locations can be categorized by culture and race. Historically, it has long been presumed that across cultures all humans perceive the world essentially in a comparable manner, viewing objects and attending to salient information in similar ways. Recently, however, our work and a growing body of literature have disputed this notion by highlighting fundamental differences in perception between people from Western and Eastern (China, Korea and Japan) cultures. Such perceptual biases occur even for the biologically relevant face recognition and the decoding of facial expressions of emotion tasks. Race instead is a universal, socially constructed concept used to categorize humans originating from different geographical locations by salient physiognomic variations (i.e., skin tone, eye shape, etc.). I will then present a series of studies showing a very early extraction of race information from faces and the impact of this visual categorization on face processing. I will discuss in turn the role of those two factors shaping visual cognition, as well as integrate data from other experiments that feed these debated fields.