Processing of Task-Irrelevant Race Information is Associated with Diminished Cognitive Control in Black and White Individuals

Interactive effects of participant and stimulus race on cognitive performance in youth: Insights from the ABCD study

An extensive literature shows that race information can impact cognitive performance. Two key findings include an attentional bias to Black racial cues in U.S. samples and diminished recognition of other-race faces compared to same-race faces in predominantly White adult samples. Yet face stimuli are increasingly used in psychological research often unrelated to race (Conley et al., 2018) or without consideration for how race information may influence cognitive performance, especially among developmental participants from different racial groups. In the current study we used open-access data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM (ABCD) Study® 4.0.1 release to test for developmentally similar other- and same-race effects of Black and White face stimuli on attention, working memory, and recognition memory in 9- and 10-year-old Black and White children (n=5,659) living in the U.S. Black and White children showed better performance when attending to Black versus White faces. We also show an advantage in recognition memory of same-race compared to other-race faces in White children that did not generalize to Black children. Together the findings highlight how race information, even when irrelevant to an experiment, may indirectly lead to misinterpretation of group differences in cognitive performance in children of different racial backgrounds.

Uncertain threat is associated with greater impulsive actions and neural dissimilarity to Black versus White faces

Race is a social construct that contributes to group membership and heightens emotional arousal in intergroup contexts. Little is known about how emotional arousal, specifically uncertain threat, influences behavior and brain processes in response to race information. We investigated the effects of experimentally manipulated uncertain threat on impulsive actions to Black versus White faces in a community sample (n = 106) of Black and White adults. While undergoing fMRI, participants performed an emotional go/no-go task under three conditions of uncertainty: 1) anticipation of an uncertain threat (i.e., unpredictable loud aversive sound); 2) anticipation of an uncertain reward (i.e., unpredictable receipt of money); and 3) no anticipation of an uncertain event. Representational similarity analysis was used to examine the neural representations of race information across functional brain networks between conditions of uncertainty. Participants-regardless of their own race-showed greater impulsivity and neural dissimilarity in response to Black versus White faces across all functional brain networks in conditions of uncertain threat relative to other conditions. This pattern of greater neural dissimilarity under threat was enhanced in individuals with high implicit racial bias. Our results illustrate the distinct and important influence of uncertain threat on global differentiation in how race information is represented in the brain, which may contribute to racially biased behavior.

Family-based care buffers the stress sensitizing effect of early deprivation on executive functioning difficulties in adolescence

We examined whether family care following early-life deprivation buffered the association between stressful life events (SLEs) and executive functioning (EF) in adolescence. In early childhood, 136 institutionally reared children were randomly assigned to foster care or care-as-usual; 72 never-institutionalized children served as a comparison group. At age 16 years, adolescents (n = 143; 54% female; 67.1% Romanian) self-reported recent SLEs, completed a battery of memory and EF tasks, and completed a go/nogo task in which mediofrontal theta power (MFTP) was measured using electroencephalogram. More independent SLEs predicted lower EF and more dependent SLEs predicted lower MFTP, but only among adolescents with prolonged early deprivation. Findings provide preliminary evidence that family care following early deprivation may facilitate resilience against stress during adolescence on EF.