What’s in a face?
When you meet people for the first time, what’s the first thing you think you notice? Is it their hair color, or eye color? Maybe it’s whether they’re wearing a suit or a T-shirt and jeans, or whether they have a firm handshake. But your brain, Harvard researchers say, immediately takes note of two key characteristics: their race and gender. Using real-time scans of the brain, recent Harvard Ph.D. Juan Manuel Contreras, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Psychology Professor Jason P. Mitchell found a brain region in which patterns of neural activity change when people look at black and white faces, and at male and female faces. The study is described in a paper published last month in the journal PLOS ONE. “We found that a brain region called the fusiform face area, or the FFA for short, seems to play a key role in differentiating faces...