More than a face: Interactions between visual and non-visual social knowledge

Abstract

Although we represent other people in terms of both what they look like and how they behave, these two aspects of person knowledge have rarely been studied together. While vision scientists have focused on the processing of faces and bodies, social psychologists have focused on the cognitive construal of others. In this dissertation, I present a series of experiments that aim to better understand how we think about other people by considering how we combine visual and non-visual knowledge in our person representations. In particular, these experiments focus on one type of interaction between visual and non-visual social knowledge: the influence of social knowledge on face perception. In the first part of the dissertation, I demonstrate that rapidly learned affective associations generalize to perceptually similar but novel faces. In the second part, I examine the mechanisms underlying this type of learning generalization. In the last part of the dissertation, I present evidence from fMRI that different facial identities are associated with unique patterns of neural activity in ventral visual cortex and I examine the influence of social knowledge on these representations. Together, these data suggest that what we know about others can change the way we see their faces.