Figure 2. Co-activation of representations in social categorization.

A recent study [20] synchronizing neuroimaging and mouse-tracking found that, when categorizing gender- or race-atypical faces (e.g., a feminine male face), participants’ hand trajectories exhibited a parallel attraction toward the opposite gender or race category response before ultimately arriving at the correct response, suggesting that the opposite category was co-activated in parallel. In the face-processing right FG, each participant’s distinct multi-voxel pattern for the male, female, White, and Black category was assessed. The results showed that the extent of parallel attraction toward the opposite category (e.g., toward ‘female’ for a male face) was associated with a greater neural-pattern similarity to that opposite category’s multi-voxel pattern (or toward ‘Black’ for a White face with Black-related features, see Fig. 1). Such work suggests that common ambiguities tend to activate alternate social categories before a categorization stabilizes, and this is reflected in the similarity of that face’s multi-voxel pattern to the alternate social category’s pattern in the right FG [20]. Thus, by examining the geometry of a given face’s neural response pattern to the patterns associated with other social categories, novel insights may be made into the mechanisms of social categorization.