Toward a Functionalist Psychophysics of Social Perception

在任何拥挤的公共场所，我们都能看到不同种族、性别、年龄、魅力、地位和举止的人。但是，是谁吸引了我们的注意力呢？我们最记得的人是谁？随着时间的流逝，我们的记忆是如何扭曲的？也许最重要的是，这些问题的答案是否取决于我们目前是否在考虑与同事相处，娱乐浪漫目标，或者保护我们的健康或安全？很少有人会质疑这样一种观点，即情绪和动机会在我们的注意力、记忆力和对社交信号的解读中引入偏见。研究社会信号检测的心理学研究人员倾向于关注信号的极值。例如，想要研究愤怒感知的心理学家通常会选择一些非常愤怒和非常快乐的面孔。像这样选择终结点的级别可能会导致重要的发现，但它也可能会掩盖只在信号范围的中间点起作用的重要过程。因此，我们对社会感知采取更多的心理物理方法是很重要的，因为在某些情况下，像通常那样只研究社会信号的极端值可能会导致关于潜在心理过程的错误结论。这项研究计划旨在探索自我保护、浪漫和社会拒绝如何调整个人对世界的体验。研究人员将利用变形和计算机动画软件的优势来创建一组面孔，在这些面孔中，与目标相关的信息，如愤怒和快乐的面部表情，会沿着连续体变化。这项研究将涉及使用面孔来检查注意力、编码和记忆，使用一些既定的方法(例如，信号检测和心理物理测量)，以及一些新的方法，包括记忆匹配游戏“注意力”。此外，这将需要系统地操纵参与者的情绪和动机状态，并将其作为检查认知加工几个阶段的动机效果的一种方式。这些激励性“质数”如何影响将刺激的物理强度与其产生的心理体验联系起来的功能，将会被确定。这项研究计划将通过帮助开发更细微的动机社会认知模型来促进对动机社会认知过程的了解，它还将扩展心理物理学理论，并理解这些功能可能如何被基本动机改变。

In any crowded public place we can see people varying in race, gender, age, attractiveness,status, and demeanor. But, who grabs our attention? Who do we most remember, and how do our memories become distorted as time passes? Perhaps most important, do answers to these questions depend on whether we are currently thinking about getting along with coworkers, entertaining romantic goals, or protecting our health or safety? Few people would dispute the idea that emotions and motivations can introduce biases in our attention, memory, and interpretation of social signals. Psychological researchers studying social signal detection tend to focus on extreme values of signals. For example, psychologists wanting to study anger perception typically select a few very angry and very happy faces. Choosing levels at the endpoints like this may lead to important discoveries, but it can also obscure important processes that only act at the intermediary points of signal's range. Therefore it is important that we take a more psychophysical approach to social perception because, in some cases, studying only extreme values of social signals as is typically done can lead to erroneous conclusions about underlying psychological processes. This research program is designed to explore the ways in which self-protection, romance, and social rejection modulate individuals' experience of the world. The researchers will utilize strengths of morphing and computer animation software in order to create sets of faces in which goal-relevant information, such as facial expressions of anger and happiness, varies along a continuum. The research will involve the use of faces to examine attention, encoding and memory, using a number of established methods (e.g., signal detection and psychophysical scaling), as well as some novel methods, including the memory matching game "concentration." In addition, this will entail systematic manipulation of participants' emotional and motivational states with guided visualizations as a way of examining motivational effects across several stages of cognitive processing. How these motivational "primes" affect the functions that link the physical magnitude of a stimulus with the psychological experience to which it gives rise will be determined. This research program will advance knowledge of the processes of motivated social cognition by contributing to the development of a more nuanced model of motivated social cognition, and it will also extend psychophysical theory, and understanding of how these functions might be altered by fundamental motivations.