Ensemble viewing reshapes neural representations of same-race and other-race faces

Ensemble viewing in 22 East Asian adults reshapes EEG face representations: same-race neural discriminability is format-dependent and early ensemble decoding favors other-race faces.

• Why it matters: The other-race effect is known for individual faces, but it is unclear whether viewing face crowds preserves or reshapes the neural benefit for same-race recognition.
• What they did: Participants viewed synthetic East Asian and White faces individually or as six-face ensembles while EEG was recorded; multivariate decoding and generative image reconstruction tested discriminability, representational geometry, and recoverable content.
• The result: Same-race decoding advantage was not preserved for race-homogeneous ensembles, though constituents retained it individually; ensemble representations were race-organized and reconstructed latent vectors matched ensemble summary targets above chance.

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