Figural emphasis and person perception

Based on Jones and Nisbett's (1972) proposition that actor-observer differences in causal attributions derive from differences in attentional focus, it was hypothesized that observers' focus of attention would influence their causal attributions for an actor's behavior. More specifically, it was predicted that the behavior of an actor who was the focus of attention by virtue of some salient physical attribute would be attributed by observers more to dispositional causes and less to situational causes than would the behavior of a less physically salient actor. The manipulations of physical salience were based upon Gestalt laws of figural emphasis in object perception. They included brightness (Study I), motion (Study II), pattern complexity (Study III), and contextual novelty (Studies IV and V). The results revealed that the salinece of the actors' environments (i.e., the other people present) rather than the salience of the actor him/herself had the most consistent influence on causal attributions. When environmental salience was high, behavior was attributed relatively more situationally than when it was low. Prior research findings are considered in light of the proposition that causal attributions for an actor's behavior vary only with the salience of his/her environment, and additional implications of this phenomenon are suggested. Some ambiguities in the application of Gestalt principles to the perception of people are discussed.     

Understanding voice perception

Voices carry large amounts of socially relevant information on persons, much like 'auditory faces'. Following Bruce and Young (1986)'s seminal model of face perception, we propose that the cerebral processing of vocal information is organized in interacting but functionally dissociable pathways for processing the three main types of vocal information: speech, identity, and affect. The predictions of the 'auditory face' model of voice perception are reviewed in the light of recent clinical, psychological, and neuroimaging evidence.     

Some psycholinguistic aspects of person perception

Adjective-noun combinations in person perception are analyzed from an integration-theoretical view, with special reference to judgments of likableness, occupational proficiency, and social value. Different theoretical considerations are shown to apply to these three judgment dimensions, but all can be conceptualized in terms of the valuation and integration operations of integration theory. Experimental support for this conceptual analysis is given for likableness and occupational proficiency. Advantages of the integration-theoretical analysis over congruity formulations are pointed out.     

Birth order and person perception dispositions

The early social experiences of firstborn, laterborn, and only children were analyzed from the viewpoint of how those experiences influence the child's general image of human nature. It was hypothesized that there are some differences in the centrality of an evaluative dimension, that are related to birth order. Subjects in Poland and in the United States rated 20 known stimulus persons on 25 trait dimensions. The results supported the hypotheses and seem to point to some origins of individual differences in certain person perception processes.     

Facial expressive cues in person perception.

The effect of facial expressions on estimates of the likelihood that a person will again commit an offense for which he has been arrested was studied. Such information did not affect estimates of 34 male and 36 female undergraduates as much as did the objective information provided about the offense. The results suggest directions for research on the role of facial expressions in interpersonal judgments.     

Abrupt category shifts during real-time person perception

Previous studies have suggested that real-time person perception relies on continuous competition, in which partially active categories smoothly compete over time. Here, two studies demonstrated the involvement of a different kind of competition. In Study 1, before participants selected the correct sex category for morphed faces, their mouse trajectories often exhibited a continuous attraction toward the incorrect category that increased with sex-category ambiguity, indicating continuous competition. On other trials, however, trajectories initially pursued the incorrect category and then abruptly redirected toward the correct category, suggesting early incorrect category activation that was rapidly reversed later in processing. These abrupt category reversals also increased with ambiguity. In Study 2, participants were presented with faces containing a sex-typical or sex-atypical hair cue, in a context in which the norm was either sex-typical targets (normative context) or sex-atypical targets (counternormative context). Sex-atypical targets induced greater competition in the normative context, but sex-typical targets induced greater competition in the counternormative context. Together, these results demonstrate that categorizing others involves both smooth competition and abrupt category shifts, and that these flexibly adapt to the social context.     

Working models of attachment and person perception processes

This study investigated the effects of attachment working models on social perception processes. Participants estimated the number of behavioral instances they would require to confirm and disconfirm hypothetical others’ possession of various traits. The attachment dimension of avoidance was associated with a defensively conservative style of social perception. High scorers on avoidance required more evidence to make a positive judgment and also more evidence to reject a negative judgment. In contrast, the attachment dimension of anxiety was associated with a relatively impulsive and labile perceptional style. High scorers on anxiety tended to require less evidence to make both positive and negative judgments of others. Results are discussed in terms of their concordance with previous findings and their implications for research on attachment and social perception.     

Integrating voice recognition into models of person perception

The results of one empirical study are presented to investigate whether voice recognition might profitably be integrated into a single IAC network for person perception. An identity priming paradigm was used to determine whether face perception and voice perception combined to influence one another. The results revealed within-modality priming of faces by prior presentations of faces, and of voices by prior presentation of voices. Critically, cross-modality priming was also revealed, confirming that the two modalities can be represented within a single system and can influence one another. These results are supported by the results of a simulation, and are discussed in terms of the theoretical development of IAC, and the benefits and future questions that arise from consideration of an integrated multimodal model of person perception.     

Understanding others: the face and person construal

The face is a critical stimulus in person perception, yet little research has considered the efficiency of the processing operations through which perceivers glean social knowledge from facial cues. Integrating ideas from work on social cognition and face processing, the current research considered the ease with which invariant aspects of person knowledge can be extracted from faces under different viewing and processing conditions. The results of 2 experiments demonstrated that participants extracted knowledge pertaining to the sex and identity of faces in both upright and inverted orientations, even when the faces were irrelevant to the task at hand. The results of an additional experiment, however, suggested that although the extraction of person knowledge from faces may occur unintentionally, the process is nonetheless contingent on the operation of a semantic processing goal. The authors consider the efficiency of person construal and the processes that support this fundamental facet of social-cognitive functioning.     

Reactive effects of concurrent verbalization in person perception tasks

The reactive effects of concurrent verbalization (CV) on task performance in impression formation research have not been investigated, despite increasing use of this process tracing method. Since many person perception tasks involve multiple trials, assessment of reactivity should focus on carry-over and reactive-practice effects, as well as changes in task performance concurrent with thinking aloud. An experimental method for assessing these three forms of reactivity was demonstrated in an information-request impression formation task. Concurrent reactive effects were found for both continuous and intermittent CV. For the former, task processing was mildly slowed but altered in a manner suggestive of more efficient learning of, and memory for cues requested early in task performance. The substantial slowing of task processing during trial 1 intermittent CV largely disappeared by trial 2, indicating that subjects may require more practice for this method to be used effectively. The results for continuous CV are in line with recent findings which are inconsistent with certain predictions from the predominant theory of verbal protocol generation (Ericsson and Simon, 1984). Investigators using CV are urged to incorporate empirical checks for reactivity into their experimental designs.     

On disregarding deviants: Exemplar typicality and person perception

A pervasive problem in mental life is that of exemplar selectivity or how one isolates specific category members from other instances of a class. This problem is particupared pronounced in person perception, where perceivers may routinely want to personalize selected individuals while continuing to respond towards other members of the category in a stereotype-based manner. To realize these flexible effects, we hypothesized that, when perceivers encounter a group member, they inevitably encode an exemplar-based representation of the individual in mind. Part of this representation, moreover, is information signaling the person's goodness-of-Fit with respect to his or her salient group memberships. When the representation is activated on a subsequent occasion, these inferences of category fit moderate the extent of stereotypical thinking. The results of two studies provided converging evidence for this analysis of stereotype function. Exemplar typicality moderated both the accessibility of Stereotypic knowledge (Study 1) anxd the extent to which perceivers used a stereotype to organize information about a target (Study 2). We consider the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for our understanding of the role of stereotypes in person perception.