Person perception: Does it involve IQ-independent perceptual processing?

Abstract

A wide range of psychological processes have been analyzed in terms of the mind's representational and central processing capacities. For example, person perception is supposed to entail that an individual infers meanings from the perception of bodily and facial cues. An alternative account is that certain basic forms of perceptual processing may not depend on the efficiency of central cognitive processing (IQ), but instead be domain specific or modular, and relatively direct in nature. In order to investigate this issue, we compared the performance of matched groups of mentally retarded and nonretarded children and adolescents on perceptual tasks involving the presentation of videotaped point-light displays of people and objects, and on a standard inspection time task. Whereas performance on the inspection time task was related to IQ, this was not the case for performance on tests involving the perception of point-light displays. We note some theoretical implications of such evidence for IQ-independent perceptual abilities.