Implementing the Behavioral Continuous Flash Suppression Test to Examine How Subcortical Signals Play a Role in the Perception of Race Faces

Abstract

Implicit biases are common in human beings and have the potential for highly consequential effects. These biases often operate subconsciously, and it is necessary to figure out all the ways in which they appear and what they might mean. Certain phenomena such as the other-race effect speak to tendencies in visual processing based on race, but a test solely for looking at subconscious visual processing based on race has not been come across in the research for this paper. To further examine this, the Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) test was used to examine subconscious visual processing in white and black participants while viewing white and black stimuli of faces in an object detection task. The aim was to determine if there were any differences in the length of time it took the two groups of faces to break through a visual suppression stimulus and whether or not there was an interaction with the race of the viewer. It was found that on average, white participants were quicker to detect black faces, and black participants were quicker to detect white faces which runs contrary to the other-race effect. Potential reasons for these findings and follow up experiments are proposed.