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、吸引力、地位和举止的人。但是，谁能吸引我们的注意力呢？我们最记得谁？随着时间的流逝，我们的记忆是如何被扭曲的？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，还是保护我们的健康或安全？很少有人会质疑情绪和动机会在我们的注意力、记忆和对社会信号的解释中引入偏见。研究社会信号检测的心理学研究者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生气和非常高兴的面孔。在这样的端点上选择电平可能会导致重要的发现，但它也会模糊只在信号范围的中间点起作用的重要过程。因此，重要的是，我们采取更心理物理的方法来研究社会知觉，因为在某些情况下，只研究社会信号的极端值，就像通常所做的那样，可能会导致对潜在心理过程的错误结论。这个研究项目旨在探索自我保护、浪漫和社会排斥如何调节个人对世界的体验。研究人员将利用变形技术和计算机动画软件的优势，创造出一系列与目标相关的面部信息，比如愤怒和快乐的面部表情，在一个连续体中变化。这项研究将涉及使用面部来检查注意力、编码和记忆，使用许多既定的方法（例如，信号检测和心理物理缩放），以及一些新的方法，包括记忆匹配游戏“集中”。此外，这将需要系统地操纵参与者的情绪和动机状态，引导可视化作为一种方法来检查跨认知处理的几个阶段的动机效应。这些动机“启动因素”如何影响将刺激的物理强度与由此产生的心理体验联系起来的功能，还有待确定。本研究项目将通过促进动机性社会认知的更细致模型的发展，推进对动机性社会认知过程的认识，并将扩展心理物理学理论，以及对这些功能如何被基本动机改变的理解。

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.