Is Threat Detection Black and White? Race Effects in Threat-Related Perceptual Decision-Making

There is a vast literature base indicating that people respond differently to Black and White individuals based on differential perceptions of threat. As facial affect is a fundamental way that individuals communicate their emotional state, studies have examined differences in how Black and White threatening facial expressions are perceived. However, perceptual decisions regarding threatening and neutral stimuli often occur in familiar contexts or in environments where explicit cues indicate the presence or absence of threat. Furthermore, these decisions often occur in “noisy” (i.e., ambiguous) environments where the quality of sensory evidence is poor, requiring us to rely on perceptual “sets” or expectations to interpret such evidence. Therefore, in the present study we used a two-alternative perceptual decision-making task in which participants used threatening and neutral cue-elicited perceptual sets to discriminate between subsequently presented threatening and neutral Black and White faces. Threatening cues led to a greater tendency to decide that both Black and White faces were threatening, as well as faster and greater discriminability between threatening and neutral Black and White faces. However, race-related differences revealed that, following both cue types, discriminability between threatening and neutral Black faces was worse compared to White faces. Therefore, using a paradigm that is ecologically valid, our findings highlight the importance of examining basic aspects of visual perception to understand race-related differences in threat-related perceptual decision-making. Furthermore, these findings emphasize the importance of anticipatory top-down factors when making perceptual decisions about the presence or absence of threat in faces of different races.