Conceptualizing "The Social Dimensions of Person Perception

概念化人感知的社会维度社会认知和神经科学的研究揭示了人们如何从视觉上提取关于另一个人的年龄、种族、情绪状态和其他特征的信息。大多数研究都集中在人脸上。然而，身体是社会信息的另一个重要载体。尽管如此，与成熟的面部感知模型相比，人们对身体感知背后的机制还没有明确的认识。因此，这个项目的总体目标是促进对人的感知的理解，考虑到脸和身体，以及社会类别和属性对他人的归因。我们计划通过结合一系列行为和神经成像技术来实现这一目标，这将有助于确定人们的外表是如何从最初阶段受到刻板印象和其他社会认知过程的影响的。一个用于理解视觉心理表征的强大结构是心理“空间”。每一张脸或每一个身体都被表示为心理“空间”中的一个“点”，这些“点”的维度描述了感知，并可能对应于诸如特征、情感、种族、年龄等社会概念。此外，心理空间有助于理解先前文献中发现的不同社会维度的交叉效应，表明它们是相互依存的。我们对一些关键问题感兴趣：代表身体和面部的心理空间的维度是什么？这些维度如何与感知和社会变量相关？“交织”的心理空间是否有助于解释社会判断和行为的某些方面？视觉适应和加纳选择性注意任务是回答上述问题的两个范例。我们计划使用偶然的视觉适应来测试维度之间的相互作用。这将使我们能够检查心理空间的相互依赖性。此外，我们计划使用加纳任务进一步测试社会变量，以建立不同心理空间加工的框架。心理“空间”的观点与大脑研究非常一致。首先，重复抑制方法是基于大脑对重复刺激的激活减少，类似于适应。在面部感知文献中，它被用来表明大脑拥有不同的动态和静态面部“空间”，这表明一种分离可能与处理不匹配刺激的难度有关。其次，神经成像数据的多变量方法侧重于大脑活动的局部模式，而不是激活的强度。使用这种方法，在心理“面孔空间”中相邻的面孔将在面部选择区域产生相似的大脑活动模式，而距离较远的面孔将产生不同的活动模式。这些模式可以告诉我们这些区域的面部编码是什么。因此，我们可以利用这些神经成像方法来检查描述社会视觉的心理空间。这个项目将通过展示我们的日常社会生活如何深刻地塑造视觉感知的基本过程，为我们对社会世界的丰富视觉表现提供新的视角。这些结果将为现有的和新的面部和身体感知模型提供信息，这是社会互动的一个重要方面。具体来说，我们的结果将有助于理解驱动社会行为的快速且有时有偏见的认知过程。因此，这项研究可能具有重大的社会意义。

Conceptualizing The Social Dimensions of Person PerceptionResearch in social cognition and neuroscience has revealed much about how people visually extract information regarding another person's age, race, emotional states, and other characteristics. Most of this research has focused on faces. However, bodies are another important carrier of social information. Despite this, there is no clear understanding of the mechanisms behind body perception, in contrast to well-developed models for face perception. Therefore, the overarching aim of this project is to contribute to the understanding of person perception, considering both faces and bodies, and the attribution of social categories and attributes to others. We plan to achieve this by combining a range of behavioural and neuroimaging techniques, which will help identify how representations of people's appearance are influenced from the earliest stages by stereotypes, and other social-cognitive processes. One powerful construct that has been applied to understanding visual mental representations is that of the mental "space". Each face or body is represented as a "point" in a mental "space", the dimensions of which describe perception and could correspond to social concepts such as traits, emotions, race, age, etc. Additionally, mental spaces help to understand the cross-over effects of separate social dimensions found in previous literature, suggesting that they are interdependent. We are interested in some key questions: what are the dimensions of mental spaces representing bodies and faces?; how do these dimensions relate to perceptual and social variables?; and do "intertwined" mental spaces help explain some aspects of social judgments and behaviour? Visual adaptation and the Garner selective attention task are two paradigms useful in answering the proposed questions. We plan to use contingent visual adaptation to test interactions between dimensions. This would allow us to examine the interdependency of mental spaces. Furthermore, we plan to use the Garner task to further test social variables towards establishing a framework of the processing of different mental spaces.The perspective of mental "spaces" aligns well to brain research. For one, the repetition suppression approach is based on the decrease of brain activation for repeated stimuli and is similar to adaptation. It has been used in the face perception literature to suggest that the brain hosts distinct dynamic and static face "spaces", suggesting a dissociation that may relate to the difficulty of processing mismatched stimuli. Second, multivariate approaches to neuroimaging data focus on local patterns of brain activity, rather than how strong the activation is. Using this approach, faces that are adjacent in a mental "face space" will produce similar patterns of brain activity in a face-selective region and distant ones will produce dissimilar patterns of activity. These patterns can inform us what is coded about faces in those regions. Therefore, we can utilise these neuroimaging methods to examine the mental spaces that describe social vision.This project will shed new light on our rich visual representations of the social world, by showing how our everyday social life deeply shapes even basic processes of visual perception. The results will inform existing and new models of face and body perception, which is an important aspect of social interactions. Specifically, our results will contribute to understanding the rapid and sometimes biased cognitive processes that drive social behaviour. Therefore, this research could have significant societal implications.