Processing Social Category Information from Faces

描述(由申请者提供)：本研究的目标是调查种族、性别和年龄等社会类别信息如何影响对面孔的感知。这将通过借鉴两个相关但尚未很好整合的研究领域的工作来实现。第一种是关于面孔的早期知觉加工，第二种则更一般地关注印象的形成。前一种传统的研究通常不涉及社会类别信息的作用，而后一种传统的研究则没有解决早期感知过程如何影响陈规定型观念和偏见等结果。 我们使用事件相关脑电位(ERPO)进行的初步研究表明，目标种族和性别对早在刺激开始后100毫秒就开始的面孔加工具有多重离散影响(Ito&Urland，出版社)。此外，在整个加工过程中，这些影响是不同的。基于此，本研究的工作假设是，社会类别成员身份在加工的早期阶段就会影响对面孔的知觉，并且随着加工的进行，这种影响会有所不同。研究建议：(A)评估社会类别成员的认知是一个多阶段过程的程度；(B)检验单一模型是否能解释不同群体维度的加工；以及(C)评估面孔加工的早期知觉方面如何与刻板印象和偏见有关。更广泛地说，这项拟议的研究将把认知神经科学中关于面孔感知的模型与社会知觉的社会心理学模型结合起来，最终目标是更好地理解社交线索是如何从面孔中提取并随后影响刻板印象和偏见的激活的全过程。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of the proposed research is to investigate how social category information such as race, gender, and age affect the perception of faces. This will be done by drawing on work from two related yet not-well-integrated lines of research. The first deals with early perceptual processing of faces, and the second focuses more generally on impression formation. Research in the former tradition has not often addressed the role of social category information whereas work in the latter tradition has not addressed how early perceptual processes affect outcomes such as stereotyping and prejudice. Preliminary research we have done using event-related brain potentials (ERPOs) shows that target race and gender have multiple discrete effects on the processing of faces beginning as early as 100 ms after stimulus onset (Ito & Urland, in press). Moreover, these effects differ throughout the time course of processing. Based on this, the working hypothesis of the proposed research is that social category membership affects the perception of faces at very early stages of processing, and that it has different effects as processing progresses. Studies are proposed that (a) assess the degree to which the perception of social category membership is a multi-staged process, (b) examine whether a single model can account for processing of different group dimensions, and (c) assess how early perceptual aspects of face processing relate to stereotyping and prejudice. More generally, the proposed research will integrate models from cognitive neuroscience on face perception with social psychological models of social perception with the ultimate goal of better understanding the full time course of how social cues are extracted from faces and later affect the activation of stereotypes and prejudice.