"Brain Areas and Timing of Implicit and Explicit Activation of Social Knowledge: Event-related Potential Study of Gender Stereotyes in Healthy Undergraduates"
Katherine A. Cameron, Washington College, Chestertown, MD 21620

Implicit attitudes are largely unconscious, automatically activated associations about social groups (e.g., males, females) revealed via a reaction-time measure, the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Consciously expressed views are known as explicit attitudes.
Previous neuroimaging, patient lesion, and behavioral evidence points to frontal and limbic regions as critical for utilizing social knowledge, such as gender-stereotypes, and suggests that accessing that knowledge either implicitly or explicitly may engage anatomically distinct, yet overlapping neural networks. For example, patients with ventromedial, but not dorsolateral, prefrontal cortex lesions are impaired in rapidly accessing gender-stereotype information on the IAT, yet both groups show similar explicit gender attitudes on sexism measures (Milne & Grafman, 2001). Here we wish to contrast the timing and neural basis of activating social knowledge about gender-trait stereotypes (e.g., females=weak, males=strong) in healthy human subjects, by recording scalp event-related potentials (ERPs), during the IAT and in a task in which subjects make explicit decisions about gender-trait stereotypes.

Katherine A. Cameron, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Washington College
300 Washington Avenue
Chestertown, MD 21620
Phone: (410) 778-7829
Fax: (410) 778-7275