Will a category cue attract you? Motor output reveals dynamic competition across person construal.

Abstract

People use social categories to perceive others, extracting category cues to glean membership. Growing evidence for continuous dynamics in real-time cognition suggests, contrary to prevailing social psychological accounts, that person construal may involve dynamic competition between simultaneously active representations. To test this, the authors examined social categorization in real-time by streaming the x, y coordinates of hand movements as participants categorized typical and atypical faces by sex. Though judgments of atypical targets were largely accurate, online motor output exhibited a continuous spatial attraction toward the opposite sex category, indicating dynamic competition between multiple social category alternatives. The authors offer a dynamic continuity account of social categorization and provide converging evidence across categorizations of real male and female faces (containing a typical or an atypical sex-specifying cue) and categorizations of computer-generated male and female faces (with subtly morphed sex-typical or sex-atypical features). In 3 studies, online motor output revealed continuous dynamics underlying person construal, in which multiple simultaneously and partially active category representations gradually cascade into social categorical judgments. Such evidence is challenging for discrete stage-based accounts.

Motions of the Hand Expose the Partial and Parallel Activation of Stereotypes

“…We can detect this spurious pattern by examining the distribution of trial-by-trial attractions and inspecting for bimodality (for validation, see Study 3 of Freeman et al, 2008). Another possibility is that, rather than results from categorization cascading continuously into the activation of stereotype knowledge, the categorization process could be gradual only to instantaneously arrive at (rather than continue flowing into) the discrete (rather than continuous) activation of stereotype knowledge.…”

“…The dynamic continuity account of person construal (Freeman, Ambady, Rule, & Johnson, 2008), drawing on dynamical models in cognitive science (Spivey, 2007;Spivey & Dale, 2004, argues that each stage continuously cascades partial products of information processing seamlessly into the next. This account posits that, during the real-time accrual of perceptual information between, for instance, catching sight of another's face and recognizing that person's sex, partial output from visual extraction continuously updates a partially active category representation (''he's [tentatively] male''), and ongoing changes of that partially active category representation continuously update partially active stereotype knowledge (''he's [tentatively] aggressive'').…”

Dynamics of cognition

“…35 Continuous response trajectories' amount and structure of variability also embody the uncertainty and increased certainty that respectively characterize early and later stages of learning in a paired-associate memory task, 36 deception, 130 and a variety of factors related to social cognition. [131][132][133][134] The results of these and other dense-sampling studies initiated fruitful exchanges about the implications of this work for cognitive science and, in particular, for dynamical interpretations of cognitive processes.16,124 Apparently, cognitive processing does not necessarily arise in singular, discrete, punctate (or nearly so) steps, but rather it unfolds continuously over time. The time scales in question here are very rapid compared to the time scale of a motor behavior or of a social interaction, for example, but, nevertheless, cognition is apparently no less dynamical than other behaviors with long-recognized dynamics.…”

The cultural neuroscience of person perception

“…We hope that by studying how the brain and culture interact, the burgeoning field of cultural neuroscience can move beyond these dichotomies and provide novel insights into psychological processes. This is especially true for the cultural neuroscience of social perception, given the dynamic and interactive nature of perceiving and interacting with others (e.g., Freeman et al, 2008;Johnson and Freeman, 2009 …”