Nikita Agarwal¹, Tyler Yamato-Chang¹, Stella F. Lourenco¹; ¹Emory University

Race and gender represent two foundational categories in face perception, shaping how people are recognized, understood, and remembered. When race and gender intersect, however, unique social and perceptual biases may emerge. The theory of ‘intersectional invisibility’ posits that individuals with intersecting marginalized identities—such as Black women—occupy a liminal space in cognition and perception, wherein they are more likely to be miscategorized than those with single-axis identities, such as Black men or White women. Here we examine the perceptual processes underlying intersectional invisibility, focusing on how race and gender interact in face categorization. Adult participants (N = 48) completed a triplet task—selecting the odd-one-out among three faces—while their choices and reaction times (RTs) were recorded. Participants represented four demographic groups: White men, White women, Black men and Black women (n = 12/group). Across 640 trials, participants compared 32 faces (White and Black, male and female) matched on age and attractiveness. Using non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS), we analyzed participants’ choices and RTs. Analyses of participants’ choices revealed highly reliable and distinct perceptual categories for both race and gender, with Black women forming their own distinct category—comparable to Black men, White men, and White women. NMDS of RTs, using 500 random starting configurations, yielded good fit to a two-dimensional solution (normalized stress = 0.066). Additionally, these analyses revealed that race was weighted more heavily than gender in participants’ perceptual categories. More specifically, race emerged as the primary dimension, with gender categories varying to some extent by participant demographics. For example, Black women showed more distinct gender categories than White women. Altogether, these findings challenge claims of perceptual miscategorization for Black women. What is more, they suggest that intersectional invisibility may emerge from conceptual processes independent of perceptual mechanisms.