Interactive effects of participant and stimulus race on cognitive performance in youth: Insights from the ABCD study

Abstract

An extensive literature shows that race information can impact cognitive performance. Two key findings include an attentional bias to Black racial cues in U.S. samples and diminished recognition of other-race faces compared to same-race faces in predominantly White adult samples. Yet face stimuli are increasingly used in psychological research often unrelated to race (Conley et al., 2018) or without consideration for how race information may influence cognitive performance, especially among developmental participants from different racial groups. In the current study we used open-access data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development^SM (ABCD) Study® 4.0.1 release to test for developmentally similar other- and same-race effects of Black and White face stimuli on attention, working memory, and recognition memory in 9- and 10-year-old Black and White children (n=5,659) living in the U.S. Black and White children showed better performance when attending to Black versus White faces. We also show an advantage in recognition memory of same-race compared to other-race faces in White children that did not generalize to Black children. Together the findings highlight how race information, even when irrelevant to an experiment, may indirectly lead to misinterpretation of group differences in cognitive performance in children of different racial backgrounds.