Theories of Person Perception Predict Patterns of Neural Activity During Mentalizing

Abstract

Social life requires making inferences about other people. What information do perceivers spontaneously draw upon to make such inferences? Here, we test 4 major theories of person perception, and 1 synthetic theory that combines their features, to determine whether the dimensions of such theories can serve as bases for describing patterns of neural activity during mentalizing. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants made social judgments about well-known public figures. Patterns of brain activity were then predicted using feature encoding models that represented target people's positions on theoretical dimensions such as warmth and competence. All 5 theories of person perception proved highly accurate at reconstructing activity patterns, indicating that each could describe the informational basis of mentalizing. Cross-validation indicated that the theories robustly generalized across both targets and participants. The synthetic theory consistently attained the best performance-approximately two-thirds of noise ceiling accuracy--indicating that, in combination, the theories considered here can account for much of the neural representation of other people. Moreover, encoding models trained on the present data could reconstruct patterns of activity associated with mental state representations in independent data, suggesting the use of a common neural code to represent others' traits and states.

The conceptual structure of face impressions

“…With respect to these dimensions, the results may provide a parsimonious explanation for cases in which their correlations may cease to be independent and shift. In one example, trait impressions of less familiar others may be more intercorrelated and lower dimensional than those of familiar others (29,30). It may be the case that perceivers rely more on their conceptual trait space, in which trait judgments are highly correlated, to make impressions of unfamiliar others when more specific person knowledge is unavailable.…”

Decoding the neural representation of self and person knowledge with multivariate pattern analysis and data‐driven approaches

“…Although the general findings of this study are in line with the previous MVP classification‐based approaches in that they demonstrate that the MPFC represents aspects of familiar identity, the fact remains that the specific type of person information that is being encoded in this region remains elusive. A second study by Thornton and Mitchell () again examined how different models of person perception might relate to the neural representations of others, this time extending the set of identities to 60 well‐known public figures and, instead of a mental simulation task, participants were asked to make inferences as to the personal preferences of each identity (i.e., liked debating with others, see Mitchell et al, 2006). The authors first identified regions that demonstrated reliable identity‐specific patterns of activity by correlating voxel‐wise and pattern‐wise similarities across split halves of the data (Figure c).…”

A Dynamic Structure of Social Trait Space

“…Accordingly, dominance and trustworthiness are positively correlated when judging close and admired others [e.g., 7] but negatively correlated when judging unfamiliar and outgroup others [e.g., 2]. Recent work further suggests that close as opposed to distant others may be represented in higher-dimensional spaces more generally, perhaps due to more complex representations of familiar personalities [8]. Together, these recent findings suggest top-down social cognitive factors may shift the dimensional space underlying face-based trait perception and thus how individuals' faces are evaluated within it.…”