Biased responding based on race is consistently observed on tests like the Weapon Identification Task (WIT), with the implication being that racial information affects decision making despite participants’ intentions to the contrary. The current work seeks to examine visual pathways that may transmit racial information. Vision science has identified two pathways from the eye to the brain, the magnocellular (M) and the parvocellular (P) pathways that we predict to be differentially involved in conveying the kind of information that cues racial identity. Prior research indicates that the M pathway takes in broad, general information about a stimulus as fast as possible, including that of ingroup (same-race) and outgroup (cross-race) information and is thus also predicted to be the mechanism primarily involved in picking up racial information and translating it to the brain. In the current study, participants performed a Weapon Identification Task. The priming images, either White or Black faces, containing spatial frequency and color manipulations, favored one pathway or the other. We found racial bias such that participants were faster to respond to guns after seeing a Black prime and faster to respond to non-guns after seeing a White prime, regardless of the pathway favored by the various visual manipulations. Interestingly, we found evidence that low spatial frequency primes prompted faster response rates than did high spatial frequency primes. This paper will discuss these results in terms of the effectiveness of the manipulation and theoretical concerns around these visual pathways.</p
