Psychology and Neuroscience of Person Perception

Understanding other people amounts to one of the most important and complex challenges humans regularly encounter. And yet, despite the enormously variable and noisy nature of social stimuli (e.g., faces and bodies, both in static and in dynamic configurations), humans reliably extract information about one another in a process that appears automatic and obligatory. Among the information spontaneously extracted from viewing even a static image of another’s face are social categories, such as sex, race, and age; personality traits, such as trustworthiness and competence; emotion; identity; and intentions. The initial perceptual operations giving rise to such impressively efficient information processing are undoubtedly important and consequential for social interaction. However, most research on person perception carried out by social psychologists during the 20th century was not focused on people as perceptual targets. Instead of focusing on the role of external appearance and perceptual input (visual, auditory, etc.) that contributes to perceiving and understanding others, research typically focused on the internal states (intentions, beliefs, traits) that can be inferred about a person, the internal cognitive mechanisms responsible for processing such social knowledge, and the downstream consequences these inferences might have for interpersonal interaction (e.g., Brewer, 1988; Hassin, Bargh, & Uleman, 2002; Kunda & Thagard, 1996; for a review, see Gilbert, 1998). Indeed, early research typically investigated person perception by presenting research participants with written descriptions of a person’s behavior or personality characteristics or by directly presenting participants with social category labels and observing the kinds of assumptions and inferences made about a person based solely on category membership. Thus, within social psychology, early research focused on primarily postperceptual processes downstream of visually based perceptions, investigating the effects of placing someone in a social category on memory for and behaviors enacted toward that individual. Indeed, social categorization in particular has a long history in social psychology of being considered a precursor to the more consequential act of stereotyping (Allport, 1954; Bargh et al., 1996; Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Although social psychologists amassed an extensive literature on the downstream consequences of person perception and social categorization, a great deal of research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience began