Kimberly A. Quinn

Categorizing others: the dynamics of person construal.

A fundamental question in social cognition is whether people categorize others on the basis of the social groups to which they belong. Integrating ideas from related work on face processing, the current research explored the emergence and boundary conditions of person categorization. Using speeded responses to facial stimuli as a marker of category activation, the authors showed in 3 experiments that person categorization: (a) occurs only under active-encoding conditions and (b) does not extend to applicable but task-irrelevant categorical dimensions, but (c) is sensitive to overlap in the perceptual features that support multiple categorical construals. The authors consider the implications of these findings for models of social-cognitive functioning and the component processes that support person perception.

Understanding others: the face and person construal.

The face is a critical stimulus in person perception, yet little research has considered the efficiency of the processing operations through which perceivers glean social knowledge from facial cues. Integrating ideas from work on social cognition and face processing, the current research considered the ease with which invariant aspects of person knowledge can be extracted from faces under different viewing and processing conditions. The results of 2 experiments demonstrated that participants extracted knowledge pertaining to the sex and identity of faces in both upright and inverted orientations, even when the faces were irrelevant to the task at hand. The results of an additional experiment, however, suggested that although the extraction of person knowledge from faces may occur unintentionally, the process is nonetheless contingent on the operation of a semantic processing goal. The authors consider the efficiency of person construal and the processes that support this fundamental facet of social-cognitive functioning.

Attentional Prioritization of Infant Faces Is Limited to Own-Race Infants

Background Recent evidence indicates that infant faces capture attention automatically, presumably to elicit caregiving behavior from adults and leading to greater probability of progeny survival. Elsewhere, evidence demonstrates that people show deficiencies in the processing of other-race relative to own-race faces. We ask whether this other-race effect impacts on attentional attraction to infant faces. Using a dot-probe task to reveal the spatial allocation of attention, we investigate whether other-race infants capture attention. Principal Findings South Asian and White participants (young adults aged 18–23 years) responded to a probe shape appearing in a location previously occupied by either an infant face or an adult face; across trials, the race (South Asian/White) of the faces was manipulated. Results indicated that participants were faster to respond to probes that appeared in the same location as infant faces than adult faces, but only on own-race trials. Conclusions/Significance Own-race infant faces attract attention, but other-race infant faces do not. Sensitivity to face-specific care-seeking cues in other-race kindenschema may be constrained by interracial contact and experience.

Attributions of Responsibility and Reactions to Affirmative Action: Affirmative Action as Help

The authors investigated the relation between attributions of responsibility and reactions to affirmative action. Participants read one of four fictitious editorials about visible minority under-employment in which responsibility for causing the underemployment problem and responsibility for solving it were manipulated. Results indicated that ratings and endorsement of affirmative action programs, and perceptions that affirmative action promotes relevant values, were highest when visible minorities were depicted as responsible for either the cause of the problem or its solution, but not both. That is, reactions to affirmative action were influenced by the interplay of attributions of responsibility for causing the problem and attributions of responsibility for providing a solution. The results of this experiment suggest that the framing of beneficiaries of affirmative action in terms of responsibility for causing and solving the problem of their disadvantage is an important determinant of reactions to affirmative action programs.

The face and person perception: Insights from social cognition

Social-cognitive investigations of face perception have tended to be motivated by different goals than cognitive and neuropsychological studies-namely, to understand the dynamics of social categorization rather than identity recognition-and the result has been a lack of cross-pollination of insights and ideas between the disciplines. We review the evidence from social cognition, with an eye to discussing how this work aligns with the Bruce and Young (1986) model of face recognition. Acknowledging the invaluable impact the model has exerted on our understanding of face recognition, we suggest that considering the bottom-up constraints of visual processing and the top-down influences of semantic knowledge will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of face perception.

Justify your alpha

In response to recommendations to redefine statistical significance to P ≤ 0.005, we propose that researchers should transparently report and justify all choices they make when designing a study, including the alpha level.

Empathy and visual perspective-taking performance

This study examined the extent to which visual perspective-taking performance is modulated by trait-level empathy. Participants completed a third-person visual perspective-taking task in which they judged the perspectives of two simultaneously presented avatars, designated “Self” and “Other.” Depending on the trial, these avatars either held the same view (i.e., congruent) or a different view (i.e., incongruent). Analyses focused on the relationship between empathy and two perspective-taking phenomena: Selection between competing perspectives (i.e., perspective-congruence effects) and prioritization of the Self avatar’s perspective. Empathy was related to improved overall performance on this task and a reduced cost of selecting between conflicting perspectives (i.e., smaller perspective-congruence effects). This effect was asymmetric, with empathy (i.e., empathic concern) levels predicting reduced interference from a conflicting perspective, especially when adopting the Self (vs. Other) avatar’s perspective. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of the self–other distinction and mental flexibility components of empathy.

Framing Social Judgment: Self-Ingroup Comparison and Perceived Discrimination

Members of disadvantaged groups often report that they are less vulnerable to discrimination than is the average member of their group. In two experiments, we examined how the framing of self-ingroup comparisons moderates this phenomenon. In Experiment 1, participants estimated the relative likelihood that either they, compared to the average member of their ingroup, would experience discrimination or that the average member of their ingroup, compared to themselves, would experience discrimination. In Experiment 2, a direct manipulation of self-ingroup similarity was added to this framing manipulation. Across the experiments, the results demonstrated that conditions highlighting differences between the individual and the group led participants to perceive themselves as much less vulnerable to discrimination than their group, relative to conditions highlighting similarities between the individual and the group.

Prioritization of self-relevant perspectives in ageing

This study investigated whether age-related sensitivity to self-relevance may benefit perspective taking, despite generally poorer perspective-taking capacity in older adults. In one perceptual matching task and two visual perspective-taking paradigms, we examined age differences in sensitivity to avatars representing self and other. In the matching task, older (60–83 years) and younger (18–20 years) adults were similarly biased toward the self- versus other-associated avatar. In the perspective-taking tasks, participants viewed these avatars within a virtual room. Task-relevant perspectives were either the same (i.e., congruent) or different (i.e., incongruent). In the 3PP–3PP task, both avatars were present, and participants adopted the perspective of one or the other. As in the matching task, young and old were similarly biased toward the self-associated avatar. However, age differences emerged in the 1PP–3PP task, which presented only one avatar per trial (varying between self and other), and participants responded based on their own first-person perspective or the avatars. In summary, age modulated the ability to take perspectives primarily when participants’ own first-person perspective was task relevant. Relative to younger adults, older adults prioritized the self (vs. other) avatar more during initial perspective computation and the first-person (vs. third-person) perspective more when selecting between incongruent perspectives.

Ingroup categorization affects the structural encoding of other-race faces: Evidence from the N170 event-related potential

The current research examined the influence of ingroup/outgroup categorization on brain event-related potentials measured during perceptual processing of own- and other-race faces. White participants performed a sequential matching task with upright and inverted faces belonging either to their own race (White) or to another race (Black) and affiliated with either their own university or another university by a preceding visual prime. Results demonstrated that the right-lateralized N170 component evoked by test faces was modulated by race and by social category: the N170 to own-race faces showed a larger inversion effect (i.e., latency delay for inverted faces) when the faces were categorized as other-university rather than own-university members; the N170 to other-race faces showed no modulation of its inversion effect by university affiliation. These results suggest that neural correlates of structural face encoding (as evidenced by the N170 inversion effects) can be modulated by both visual (racial) and nonvisual (social) ingroup/outgroup status.