Race and gender of faces can be ignored.

Past research indicates that faces can be more difficult to ignore than other types of stimuli. Given the important social and biological relevance of race and gender, the present study examined whether the processing of these facial characteristics is mandatory. Both unfamiliar and famous faces were assessed. Participants made speeded judgments about either the race (Experiment 1) or gender (Experiments 2-4) of a target name under varying levels of perceptual load, while ignoring a flanking distractor face that was either congruent or incongruent with the race/gender of the target name. In general, distractor-target congruency effects emerged when the perceptual load of the relevant task was low but not when the load was high, regardless of whether the distractor face was unfamiliar or famous. These findings suggest that face processing is not necessarily mandatory, and some aspects of faces can be ignored.