Psychology and Neuroscience of Person Perception

Abstract

AbstractUnderstanding other people is an important and consequential task, and thus it is not surprising that the perceptual system is attuned to extract relevant information (e.g., social categories, identity, traits, and intentions) available in the faces, bodies, and voices of other people. As a result, social information is quickly inferred from even a brief glimpse of another's face, although this process can be prone to systematic biases. Recent interdisciplinary developments spanning across social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and vision science have enabled a deeper understanding of person perception and its underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. In this chapter, we discuss how perceptions of other people are formed rapidly not only through a wealth of bottom‐up features inherent in the target of perception (e.g., facial, bodily, and vocal cues) but also through a number of top‐down factors harbored in the perceiver (e.g., stereotypes, person knowledge, goals, and intergroup processes). In addition, we discuss extant research on the neural architecture of person perception and recent computational models. We conclude by discussing downstream consequences of person perception (e.g., discrimination and bias in leadership roles and mate selection) and emerging approaches to person perception that trace these downstream consequences to more basic processes.