Title: More than meets the eye: Dynamic person perception

Speaker: Jon Freeman, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Psychology and Neural Science, New York University

Time: 13:00-15:00, November 13, 2018

Location: Room 1113, Wang Kezhen Building

Abstract:

Initial social perceptions are often thought to reflect direct read-outs of facial features. Our recent research suggests that they instead emerge from an automatic yet gradual process of negotiation between the perceptual cues inherent to a person (e.g., facial cues) and top-down social cognitive processes harbored within perceivers. Integrative evidence from real-time behavioral paradigms (e.g., mouse-tracking), brain-imaging, and computational modeling will be discussed. This work shows that perceptions of a face’s gender, race, emotion, and even trait inferences (e.g., trustworthiness) are fundamentally shaped by context and one’s own stereotypes, prior knowledge, and intergroup experiences. We find that these top-down impacts on initial perceptions are driven by the interplay of higher-order prefrontal regions involved in top-down predictions and lower-level fusiform regions involved in face processing. These dynamics can create systematic visual biases, which we show in certain cases may uniquely predict real-world behaviors, such as female politicians’ electoral failure or racial prejudice—independent of group membership itself. Together, this work suggests that split-second social perceptions are malleable and shaped by context and higher-order social cognition. In turn, such malleability can create biases during initial perceptions that shape real-world behavior and may serve as a foundation for certain forms of prejudice.

Host PI: Prof. Shihui Han