Electrophysiological indexes of ingroup bias in a group Stroop task: Evidence from an event-related potential study

Abstract

Although cognitive system assigns higher attentional resources to ingroup information than outgroup information, but it is unclear whether the ingroup bias can be measured by the processes that are related to allocation of attentional resources to ingroup information. Thus, a group Stroop task was developed to study the issues combining with event-related potential (ERP) technique in this study. Specifically, 34 subjects (17 female, mean age = 20.76 ± 1.26) were firstly divided into blue or red group (17 subjects for each group); then they were asked to categorize four words of Stroop task into “our team” or “other team” based on the ink color (blue/red) of the words whose meaning were also red/blue. The behavioral results showed that outgroup ink color processing was interfered by ingroup word meaning, but the ingroup ink color processing was less/not interfered by outgroup word meaning. The ERP results showed that the amplitude of frontal N100 was enhanced when more attentional resources were automatically captured by ingroup information in early stage than outgroup information; P2/N2 amplitude was reduced or enhanced when outgroup information processing was interfered by ingroup information; enhanced P3b amplitude reflected that attention could be more easily allocated to ingroup information than outgroup information based on target. This study implied a novel direction to study the neural basis of ingroup bias by investigating the roles of ingroup bias in assigning attentional resources to group information.