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"There appears to be a critical phase shortly after an other-race face appears that determines whether or not that face will be remembered or forgotten," Lucas says. "In other words, the process of laying down a memory begins almost immediately after one first sees the face."
Previous research has associated this very early phase -- what is known as the N200 brain potential -- with the perceptual process of individuation. That process involves identifying personally unique facial features such as the shape of the eyes and nose and the spatial configuration of various facial features.
[...]
he N200 waves were large for all same-race faces, regardless of whether or not they later were successfully remembered. In contrast, N200 waves were larger for other-race faces that were remembered than for other-race faces that were forgotten.
Of course, not all same-race faces were successfully recognized, the researchers say. Accordingly, their study also identified brain activity that predicted whether or not a same-race face would be remembered. A specific brain wave starting at about 300 milliseconds and lasting for several hundred milliseconds was associated with what the psychologists call "elaborative encoding."
In contrast to individuation (which involves rapidly identifying unique physical attributes from faces), elaborative encoding is a more deliberate process of inferring attributes. For example, you might note that a face reminds you of someone you know, that its expression appears friendly or shy, or it looks like the face of a scientist or police officer.
Making these types of social inferences increases the likelihood that a face will be remembered.
"However, this strategy only works if the process of individuation also occurred successfully -- that is, if the physical attributes unique to a particular face already have been committed to memory," Lucas says. "And our study found that individuation is not always engaged with other-race faces."
Why is individuation so fragile for other-race faces? One possibility, the researchers say, is that many people simply have less practice seeing and remembering other-race faces.
"People tend to have more frequent and extensive interactions with same-race than with other-race individuals, particularly racial majority members," Lucas says. As a result, their brains may be less adept at finding the facial information that distinguishes other-race faces from one another compared to distinguishing among faces of their own racial group.
Another possible explanation involves "social categorization," or the tendency to group others into social categories by race. "Prior research has found that when we label and group others according to race we end up focusing more on attributes that group members tend to have in common -- such as skin color -- and less on attributes that individuate one group member from others," Lucas says.
For "How Social Pressure Can Affect What We Remember: Scientists Track Brain Activity as False Memories Are Formed" click
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For "Moving Microscopic Vision Into Another New Dimension" click
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Chemistry Nobel Laureate Ahmed H. Zewail and colleagues moved high-resolution images of vanishingly small nanoscale objects from three dimensions to four dimensions when they discovered a way to integrate time into traditional electron microscopy observations. Their laser-driven technology allowed researchers to visualize 3-D structures such as a ring-shaped carbon nanotube while it wiggled in response to heating, over a time scale of femtoseconds. A femtosecond is one millionth of one billionth of a second. But the 3-D information obtained with that approach was limited because it showed objects as stationary, rather than while undergoing their natural movements.
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Well, according to Jonah Berger, the author of a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the sharing of stories or information may be driven in part by arousal. When people are physiologically aroused, whether due to emotional stimuli or otherwise, the autonomic nervous is activated, which then boosts social transmission. Simply put, evoking certain emotions can help increase the chance a message is shared.
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