The effect of perceptual load on the processing of multiple social categories in face.

The aim of this study is to explore the processing features of the multi-social categories and their mechanisms of interaction. Adopting the Inhibition Paradigm in experiment 1, this study investigated whether the race and gender information obtained from images of face would influence the judgment of name category under the different perceptual load levels. The results of two sub-experiments showed that facial features contained strong, intuitive clues for race category. When the perceptual load level was low, it was automatically processed whether it was related to the task or not; when the perceptual load level was high, the automated process did not occur. The gender category utilized top-down flexible processing, which could be affected easily by the intent of the task. It was not processed when it was irrelevant to the task. Experiment 2 further proved that the different levels of difficulty would not have impact on the results of experiment 1. In summary, this study suggests that the race category is an automatic process from the bottom to up, which affects the processing of irrelevant primitive social categories; and that gender processing is regulated by the task intention, exhibiting top-down processing characteristics without affecting the processing of irrelevant primary social categories. Therefore, it can be concluded that there is an asymmetry in the interaction of the primary social categories.