Psychology and Neuroscience of Person Perception

Abstract

Understanding other people is an important and consequential task, and thus it is not surprising that the perceptual system is attuned to extract relevant information (e.g., social categories, identity, traits, and intentions) available in the faces, bodies, and voices of other people. As a result, social information is quickly inferred from even a brief glimpse of another's face, although this process can be prone to systematic biases. Recent interdisciplinary developments spanning across social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and vision science have enabled a deeper understanding of person perception and its underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. In this chapter, we discuss how perceptions of other people are formed rapidly not only through a wealth of bottom‐up features inherent in the target of perception (e.g., facial, bodily, and vocal cues) but also through a number of top‐down factors harbored in the perceiver (e.g., stereotypes, person knowledge, goals, and intergroup processes). In addition, we discuss extant research on the neural architecture of person perception and recent computational models. We conclude by discussing downstream consequences of person perception (e.g., discrimination and bias in leadership roles and mate selection) and emerging approaches to person perception that trace these downstream consequences to more basic processes.

The effect of group membership and individuating information on automatic and deliberate evaluation of well-known people.

“…In Studies 20–23, we tested the generalizability of the discrepancy findings to other social groups (old and young people) and to non-American population (Israelis). We chose the groups old and young people because, like race, age is processed relatively quickly and is commonly used to categorize individuals to groups (Brooks & Freeman, 2018). We tested whether the preference measured with an indirect measure would be less favorable of famous old people (compared with famous young people) than the preference measured with a direct measure.…”

Communication Objectives Model (COM): A Taxonomy of Face-to-Face Communication Objectives to Inform Tele-Presence Technology Adoption

“…Face "averageness," on the other hand, has been shown to increase judgments of trustworthiness (Sofer et al, 2015). Brooks and Freeman (2018) also review previous research on vocal cues for mental models of others, noting that very short voice samples can lead to accurate predictions of body size, affect, age, gender, and race. Listeners also feel confident in making judgments about trustworthiness based on voice, whether or not they are correct.…”

“…In the context of both face-to-face and computer-mediated communication, mental models will be informed by the person's social and cultural context (Mantovani, 1996; for review, see Lee & Malcein, 2020). The unconscious categorization of others into social categories may also contribute to the formation of mental models based on a persons' previous experience with other demographically similar individuals or based on an accurate estimation of personality traits from brief video clips (i.e., person perception; for review, see Brooks & Freeman, 2018). Often only a few seconds in length, video clips showing "thin slices" of behavior offer cues such as facial expressions, voice cues, and body pose that influence categorization (Weisbuch & Ambady, 2011).…”

Membership categorization analysis as means of studying person perception

“…Perceiving people in images differs from perceiving people in real-life situations. However, several studies have found people use similar strategies (e.g., categorization) and pay attention to similar features when perceiving people in images and in real-life encounters (Brooks and Freeman 2018;Oosterhof and Todorov 2008). In addition, in both situations, people use their knowledge and experience of social life when categorizing the people (Demarrais and Robb 2013;Yang 2015).…”