The Face-Race Lightness Illusion Is Not Driven by Low-level Stimulus Properties: An Empirical Reply to Firestone and Scholl (2014)

Abstract

Levin and Banaji (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135, 501–512, 2006) reported a lightness illusion in which participants appeared to perceive Black faces to be darker than White faces, even though the faces were matched for overall brightness and contrast. Recently, this finding was challenged by Firestone and Scholl (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 2014), who argued that the nominal illusion remained even when the faces were blurred so as to make their race undetectable, and concluded that uncontrolled perceptual differences between the stimulus faces drove at least some observations of the original distortion effect. In this paper we report that measures of race perception used by Firestone and Scholl were insufficiently sensitive. We demonstrate that a forced choice race-identification task not only reveals that participants could detect the race of the blurred faces but also that participants’ lightness judgments often aligned with their assignment of race.