PSY 152 Social Cognition Lecture Notes PDF

Lecture 1- Sept 30 What is social cognition? - how people process, store, and use information to make sense of people and interact with the social world - an approach that uses cognitive psychology principles to understand social psychological phenomena - ex) we look at kamala harris through a photo...

Lecture 1- Sept 30 What is social cognition? - how people process, store, and use information to make sense of people and interact with the social world - an approach that uses cognitive psychology principles to understand social psychological phenomena - ex) we look at kamala harris through a photo Without realizing we look at her face, which leads as to encode that information in categories (this case we categorize that face with an identity) We can categorize that face with an identity by associating that face category (obama the first black president or trump her opponent), which we narrow down to identity her as kamala harris After identifying her face we can categorize her with various traits that we associate (ex. Democrat or a woman) those traits are more likely to be associated with her if we relate to her (like if we are democrat we most likely trait her as smart and nice) Other people that are attached to her can also be thought of (ex. If we think of kamala we are most likely to think of her husband or joe biden since she is the vice president) Statements she makes can be perceived differently depending on peoples group beliefs Whats special about social cognition? - people are (and inanimate (living beings) objects are mostly not) Intentional causal agents (doing things with an intent) Perceive us back (to how differently everyone perceives things) Similar to self (we can infer what others think based on our thoughts and beliefs) Self-conscious targets (when we perceive others they can adjust their behaviors to be viewed positively, so we can realize that how they present themselves isn’t their true actions or thoughts) Holders of crucial but nonobservable traits (like if some is smart, but we can observe that trait directly so we assume based on behaviors) Changeable (behaviors of people can change overtime so complicates how we perceive them) Known with interdeteminate accuracy (we can never know someone completely) Complex! (requires more mental computations)  Require explanation (why behaviors or thoughts occur) Lecture 2- Oct 2 Beginning of psychology as a discipline - william james: father of psychology (1842-1910) Principles of psychology (book published) - Stream of consciousness, emotion, habit, will - sigmund freud (1856-1939) Psychoanalysis - Therapist makes conscious a patient’s unconscious goals and thoughts - He had a belief that we are not conscious of all the process we use - Studying the unconscious is only of the goals of social psychologist in their research - wilhelm wundt- father of research psychology (1832-1920) Psychology as a science - Reaction time measures , introspection Reaction time - the time it takes a participant to respond to a stimulus - when you close your eyes and imagine something you will know what it is so a faster reaction time ex) you are asked if a dog image is a dog so you respond fast since you can imagine an image similar to the one provided - when you are given a question that doesn’t match it can a longer reaction time ex) you are given a cat and asked if its dog slower reaction time as you process you unconscious image of a dog Introspection (a way of solving a problem) - process of examining the operations of one’s own mind with the goal of discovering how the mind works Given images and asked if each is a dog so you reason why each image is a dog or not - Introspection can give you insight of categorical insight (this example was categorical- about dog images) Elemental vs. Holistic - elemental approach (breaking down to solve) Breakdown a stimulus or process into the component parts and analyze these parts separately before figuring out how they combine - holistic approach (look as a whole to solve) The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. A stimulus or process is understood best by focusing on the entire configuration of the parts - Gestalt psychology Kurt koffka (1886-1941) Figure-ground perception Critiques of Introspection - the whole is greater than the sum of its parts - the act of introspection could influence how a person processes a stimulus - we don’t have conscious access to many psychological processes - introspective reports (especially for complex mental processes are unreliable) ex) if we ask different individuals how a sunset makes them feel they will give them different answers. The introspective reports will be diverse, so commonality so they won’t give much insight - introspection work was highly criticized Rise and dominance of behaviorism (1920s-1950s) - john watson (1878-1958) - behavior is objective because it is observable - mental processes (ex. Thinking, feeling) should be explained through behavioral terms (or not considered scientifically useful) - all behavior can be reduced to stimulus-response associations - ex) little albert experiment Was looking at fear as a response to stimulus Used fear to explain processes Meanwhile in social psychology - Kurt Lewin: father of social psychology (1890-1947) B= F(P,E) Where b= behavior, p=person,e= environment (social situation - personally psychology : B=F(P) Correlate traits, attitudes, emotions, motives, values with what people do in the real world Environment is noise Real drive is person attributes - social psychology: B= F(e) Manipulate the social environment and see how people react  Person is noise Classic social psychology: milgram experiment (1963) - basically situation → response Only given situation led to response - this showed that at the time they would narrow into the environment and not focused on how the person attributes were responding or thinking (people were noise) There wasn’t focus on the mental process of the people - 2/3 of participants went all the way that could kill - situational features that increased obedience Commands given by an authority figure Study took place at a prestigious institution Authority figure in the roome with the participant Learner was in another room Participants did not see other subjects disobeying commands Mischel’s critique of personality - personality and assessment (1968) Low correlation between traits and behaviors Person variables are predicting behaviors very well Summer camp splitting between aggressive and non-aggressive kids Saw that in presence of authority aggressive kids weren’t but in presence of peers they were aggressive This gave more evidence for the power of the situation than people Cognitive revolution (1950s) - behaviorism can’t explain everything B.F. Skinner’s verbal behavior - Stimulus-response theory of language  Noam chomsky’s critique - Children learn language without being explicitly taught - We can produce and understand novel sentences - the computer as a metaphor for the mind Input → processing and storage → output information processing approach - Mental operations broken down into sequential stages - the new look movement Jerone bruner (1919-2016) - On Perceptual readiness “All perceptual experience is necessarily the end product of a categorization process” - (need to understand everything going in the mind will help them perceive things) Motivations, emotions, and category knowledge influence perception  Brought in rich and poor 10 year old kids and estimate size of 25 cents Found even though the rich slightly overestimated (25%) and the rich kids overestimated (50%) Interpreted that poor kids saw money as desirable since it ruled in their mind they really overestimated the size of the coin Which shows judgment has influence in perception Cognitive psychology’s influence on social psychology (1970s- present) - mentalism Belief in the importance of cognitive structures that represent general knowledge about a given concept or stimulus domain and one’s memory for specific experiences Situation → mental representation of situation → response Core function of social cognition, which is understand the mental representation of situation to lead to response Models of the social thinker - consistency seeker Drive to reduce discomfort from cognitive discrepancy Cognitive dissonance - native scientist (1970s) Rational analysis What are the important variables that lead to responses Idea that people are rational deliberate thinkers - social cognition coming after 1970s - cognitive miser (1980s) Limited processing capacity We can’t take in everything given us so we have to take shortcuts to process as much information as possible - motivated tactician (1990s) Capable of careful processing if necessary - activated actor (200s) nonconscious processing is pervasive Other influences - social development Theory of mind, joint attention - evolutionary theory Social brain hypothesis, coalitional psychology - neuropsychology/ clinical psychology, cognitive neuroscience Prosopagnosia, autism - philosophy Moral reasoning Lecture 3- Oct 7 Attention shapes reality - it is not stimuli → response because the brain can’t compute all the process - so it is stimulus → mental representation of stimulus → response Response is a result of whatever we have in a mental representation on stimulus - attention has an important cognitive role of mental representation of stimulus ex) there is a man and a woman talking and depending on who you are paying attention to you will interpret specific mental representation - If you only look at the man you will respond by thinking the man is angry What are different ways we direct our attention? - internal attention : an example is thinking of your thoughts - external attention : an example is looking at something - internal vs external attentional focus Fox et al (2005) - Cool colors= default mode network (ex. Task negative network) Involved when we are thinking of our own thoughts doing internal attention - Warm colors= task positive networks When we have a talks to do that attends to the external world Internal attentional focus - focusing on own thoughts and feelings (stream of consciousness) - mind wandering (smallwood and schooler, 2015) Self-generated thoughts and feeling - interoception (tsakiris and de preester, 2019) Attention to the internal states of your body (ex. Hunger, thirst, breathing, heart rate) - proprioception (grafton, 2020) Attention to the position and movement of the body - self-consciousness (duval and wicklund, 1972) Awareness of the self and one's' behaviors more than the external world - self-monitoring (snyder, 1979) Attending to how much one is presenting oneself inline with social norms and personal ideals External attentional focus - exogenous attention (posner and cohen , 1984) stimulus-driven , bottom-up , spontaneous (unvoluntary) ex) wake up pranks - In a lot of clips people are sleep but there is something in environment that gets attention, thus forcing them to wake up - endogenous attention (posner and cohen 1984) Voluntary, top-down, goal-directed  ex) where’s waldo - Need mental representation of waldo and scan scene to find him - You are looking for him (goal-directed) internal/external , exogenous/endogenous it is complicated - spren et al Had participants do a autobio planning task or visual spatial planning tasks (had three disks and imagine how you would move them around to get to the goal visual) visual spatial planning tasks (had three disks and imagine how you would move them around to get to the goal visual - autobio planning task: goal to imagine life to have freedom from debt - Have a good job, saving money, and having fun Task-related activity - Blue: default mode network (involved in internal attention) (so autobio planning we don’t look at external we focus internally and organize thoughts to rearrange life to have freedom from debt) - Red: dorsal attention network (similar to task positive network: focusing external environment) (so like visual spatial as you focus on disk and how you would move them) - Green : frontoparietal control network (executive functioning) (since both are planning tasks we use executive functions that use memory and how to process) So visual spatial needs internal to how moving the disks and external when actually moving them - Study shows that we sometimes focus internally and sometimes externally (so everything we do in the world is dynamic as we switch from both) What capture our attention in the social world? - sticking out from immediate context Novelty (solo person of a particular race, sex, hair color, shirt color) Figural objects (bright, complex, moving) Dominating the visual field (sitting at the head of the table- since we tend to focus on them more) - defying perceivers’ expectations Behaving in an unusual way Behaving unlike other people in your group Behaving negatively or extremely (norm in society we should behave relatively positive and not extreme) - high relevance to perceivers’ goal Observing a target person who you have been told to watch - ex) you are a security guard and told to look for a criminal so when you see them you will focus attention to them Encountering someone who is self-relevant to you and environment (ex. Boss - you want to keep job so pay attention to them) Salience vs vividness - salience (some things will capture attention more than others in certain context) Attracts attention relative to the context - vividness (will get attention no matter the context) Attracts attention regardless of the context ex) a knee to the face will get attention is any situation - nisbett and ross (1980) A stimulus is vivid to the extent it is - a) emotionally interesting - b) concrete and imagery-provoking - c) proximate in a sensory temporary or spatial How limited is our attention? - the social world is complex (making it possible to process everything) ex) a video with a police officer - She takes the most attention because she in the middle of the scene - Her aggressive tone - Since she attracts attention we won’t look at things around her - So our mental representation will be about the police officer - inattentional blindness (simons and chabris, 1999) Failure to notice an unexpected object because attention was engaged elsewhere) - perception of environment is dependent on our own mental representations What are the consequences of limited attention? - social cognitive blind spots Consensus bias - The belief that one’s perspective is more widely held than is actually the case - Others are going to perceive the world we do Naive realism - The belief that you see the world objectively and those who have differing views are biased or uninformed - That if people don’t see the world we do they are wrong Stereotypes - Over-generalized belief about a group of people - Use stereotypes to make sense of a the world - biases in the criminal justice system Scott v harris - Either of nine justices rules in favor of officer scott - If… I see with my eyes what happened, what am I supposed to do?” - Justice Breyer - Lone dissenter.. Justice Stevens He saw slowing at turns and using appropriate indicator lights Both justices saw different things so they perceived different scenarios and led to the outcome of the court How do people allocate limited attention during complex social interactions? - white and carlson (1983) Hypothesis 1) People use schemas (cognitive structure) to make sense of the situation 2) People attend to schema consistent information to confirm that the schema is appropriate - People look for information to support their schemas 3) People switch attention to novel information 4) People monitor for schema consistent information and will switch attention if schema needs updating - Small attention to still support schema to see if information is consistent - If it is not matching up then they back to evaluate schema - white and carlson study Participant had headphones to either listen to brain or paul conversations Perceiver was told brain was a kind person that made participant construct a scheme and no information on paul Participant had switch to make volume of either paul or brain louder She first listened to more at brain conversations since she had a schema brain was kind to verify it and said he seems pretty kind  After confirming schema of brain she switched to paul to learn about him and still can listen to brain’s and when it sounded that brain was being unkind she was like thats weird and go back to brains conversation Participant was using schemas to allocate attention to maximize information processing They also looked at they study - Average perception of kindness - Conditions (looking over to brian being kind, toggle putting brain at unattended or attentive, and asking about confidence in their judgment ) In unattended you assume brian is being kind When attended you listen to what he says and you evaluate him more as less kind If you asked about schemas they are highly confident the brain is acting according to their schemas. So they were confidence in the schema inconsistencies not happening Teaches us how people make sense of a social world when they have limited attention Importance of schemas for guided attention in social situations: insight from autism - despite limited attention we still allocate to processing information as much as possible - however, in autism one is not able to flexibly update or manipulate schemas to a certain situation it is difficult to process Lecture 4- Oct 9 People focus on people - Birmingham, bischof, kingstone Had scenes with people and objects that were thought to capture attention Inanimate objects tend to be intentional causal agents These characteristics make people salient Faces is particularly informative - looking at faces you can infer Feeling based on facial expressions Thoughts Communication - speaking, talking, language, facial expressions Actions People focus on the face and eyes - alfred yarbus eye movements and vision Had people look at scenes and track their eyes and showed that people typically fixate on heads and faces When he would show only heads the fixation was a lot of the eyes - birmingham , bischof, and kingstone In one study she presented people in scenes to look at where exactly people were looking Found that people would focus on the face The results overwhelmingly suggested that people focus on the eyes Eye gaze communicates a lot of information - direct vs averted gaze signals Felt emotions and intention (adams and kleck, 2003) Status/power (gobel et al. , 2015) - cooperative eye hypothesis White sclera (surrounds pupil) evolved to facilitate gaze tracking and communication - Allows us to clearly see where people are directing their eye gaze That we have while sclera that follows someone’s eye gaze and gives us an insight to what they are communicating allowing for easily cooperation Autism and focusing on the eyes - birmingham, clerf, and adophs Had people look at scenes that had people and used eye tracking to examine where people were looking participants : autism diagnosed or control not diagnosed 3 tasks - Neutral task: what room is this? explain. - Describe task: describe the picture - Social attention task : describe where people in the picture are directing their attention. How do you know? Results looked at the amount of time participants looked at different parts of the scene - No difference in proportion in difference of social gaze between those with autism and control - But broke down when they would look at the fixation (1st fixation where they looked, 2nd where they looked, etc) - In first fixation there was no difference in proportion of the eyes in time with autism and control - 2nd fixation, control continued to fixate on eyes and those autism did not - Autism (ASD) did not time of how many times they looked on eyes in the different tasks - But control had the most fixation on the eyes for the social attention tasks People with asd will look at the eyes People with asd don’t look at the eyes with the same meaning as those without. People without asd know that certain activities looking at the eyes more than others Suggests that those with ASD don’t know when to differ in portion of eye fixation In general those with asd look less on eyes than those without Does the brain process faces differently than other objects - found that faces activate the FFA more than non-face objects - Haxby et al , 2000: that even tho the FFA is in face processing, it is not the only part - Bentin et al, 1996: there is a component of the n170 that 100ms after seeing a face the brain is processing a face differently than other objects Is it all about expertise? - one argument is that the FFA is processing objects we have high expertise We have more expertise of faces because of how much information it gives us - gauthier et al Gave participants of novel objects (greebles- are curved and have angled parts) Researchers found that the FFA responded more to faces than greebles Researchers had participants learn to differentiate the greebles and found that the FFA was responding just as much to greebles to faces {suggesting that the FFA works when they are familiar with something} - gauthier et al pt 2 Took advantage of people that had expertise in different fields Participants were car and bird experts and first given objects they aren’t experts in In both the bird and car their FFA was responding more to faces than objects Had participants look at cars and non-face objects. For car experts they had high FFA responding because they are familiar with cars since they are experts Also had participants look at different birds and non-face objects. For bird experts their FFA was higher in responding to birds than other non-face objects since they know about faces Prosopagnosia: Face Blindness - difficulty recognizing faces (hard knowing whose face belongs to who) - congenital or acquired About 2% of population has congenital prosopagnosia - normal IQ, low-level vision broader social skills - able to disambiguate objects from faces - very stressful - specific to people who have trouble with facial processing How do we encode faces? - focus attention on the eyes and mouth Initial saccade to the eyes Most time fixated on the eyes - holistic/configural processing “Glue” the features together into a gestalt Perceive features in relation to each other We look at facial features in how they relate to each other Evidence for holistic encoding of faces - face inversion effect When a face is upright we process it holistically/configurally When the face is inverted we process facial features one by one (piecemeal) as they analyze them individually In non face objects you look at individual features no matter if it is upright or inverted - thatcher effect To easily identify a inverted person you invert their facial features as well and still do it as a piece meal option - composite face effect You present to half that are identical to each other but the bottom halves are different You determine if the top halves are identical, which is hard Since we look at a face configured it makes the top halves look different from one another - part-whole effect Get target image and two probes (can be eyes) One probe is eyes from the target image and other probe from different images When you look at only the eyes it's hard to match it to the target But when we are given to whole pictures probes to match it is easily because in the real world we aren’t identifying based on one feature Holistic face encoding and prosopagnosia - participants had developmental prosopagnosia (DPs) and control and had them do part whole task - found that generally controls did better overall. But both control and DP did better when they had the whole face probe to look at Suggests that those with prosopagnosia also have a holistic way - however when it comes to just the eyes That DP don’t use configural processing when it comes to the eyes - when it came to the nose, it doesn’t really matter in processing faces - in the mouth trials People do better with the whole probes than partial regardless of DP or not Inferences from faces - health and attractiveness Facial redness increases perceived healthiness and attractiveness (particularly in women) - fertility (sign of redness is for fertility) Facial coloration tracks changes in women’s estradiol Because estradiol is a dilator it allows blood to flow more so makes face red so it allows face to show more fertility - baby face overgeneralization Adults perceived to have a baby face = childlike traits - naive , submissive, weak, warm, and honest  Baby face features include - Larger eyes - Higher eyebrows - Smaller nose bridges - Rounder and less angular faces - Thicker lips - Lower vertical placement of features Creates a higher forehead and a shorter chin - emotion overgeneralization Facial structures that resemble emotional expressions are perceived according to the emotions implied by these expressions Study had people with neutral faces - Had machine learn algorithm to guess specific emotion traits the person may have - Those to be happy thought to be more responsible, trustworthy, and caring Another study took the same face and manipulated if the ends of the mouth was curved down or up - Even though the rest of the face was the same besides the mouth people reported that the eyes conveyed either happiness or sadness - This showed that people process a face holistically and not individually by facial features - trustworthiness (how much warmth a face is conveying) and dominance (if someone had the capability to control us or hurt us) are two main dimensions for evaluating faces - first impressions only require a face to appear for 100 ms Due to us holistically processing the face allow for efficient processing Implications for behavior and society - politics Candidate perceived as more competent won in 71.6 % of the senate races and in 66.8 % of the house races Study suggests that people judge competence based on face without caring for what they stand for -legal system Defendant more likely to lose case if plaintiff is attractive Baby faces defendants more likely to - Win cases alleging intentional action - Lose cases involving purported negligence Lecture 5- Oct - concept An object of thought ex) have thoughts of things that don’t exist like unicorns - category Class of equivalent objects ex) we can assign different categories to apples, like granny smith or red apple - categorization Process of partitioning objects into categories People are cognitive misers - cognitive miser Utilize efficient mental strategies to simplify the complexity of the social world - Assign new information to categories that are easy to process mentally ex) socially we can categorize both images of michelle obama; one she is looking in front and other on the side - But if we don’t use the categorization that both are michelle obama, then each image would be perceived differently - But since we categorize her as michelle obama all the information we have about her becomes activated - So it makes the processing of information easier How do we categorize - maximize within-category similarity relative to between-category similarity - how do we determine similarity? We need to understand what we mean by similarity Classical View - summary list of features that are necessary and sufficient ex) triangle- closed geometric form, three sides, and internal angles sum to 180 degrees - problems Failure to define specifying features - ex) like we see a dog has four legs but one shows up with three legs Goodness of example - some objects are better fit for categories than others - ex) you would say a robin fits more as a bird that ostrich Unclear cases - ex) if you ask if a rug is a piece of furniture you would have to pause and think about it - Basically you have think if an object matched the summary list of features] - Occurs a lot with cases of ambiguity Prototype view - family resemblance principle Categories are “fuzzy” Organized around a set of properties or correlated attributes Members of the category mainly have the same features - prototype Summary representation - more typical members have more characteristic properties - ex) imagine a white guy that is walking and encounters a black person. The white person will encode that the individual is black and stores the representation in memory. Then encounters another guy and encodes information and categorizes him a black as well. The white person is building a representation of the category of a black man based on the individuals he saw. If the prototype view is correct, then the summary representation formed is going to a mixture of all the individuals he sees. Eventually in the future when he sees more black men he will encode the information and compare it to his prototype and if what he sees matches the prototype he will categorize them as a black man. Exemplar VIew - no prototypes - exemplars started in memory We store specific representations as examples and label than as belonging to the same category ex) so a person may have different black individuals stored as exemplars of black men to compare the new encoding of information when see a new individual with the exemplars and categorizing if the individuals is a black man - one argument on why it is better than prototype view is that it conserves exemplar knowledge Large birds do not sing (intuitively thought). If we were to think about it as a prototype we would encounter birds and think of a prototype for it, which is not efficient. Instead it would better to think of different representations of large birds that are recognized that can’t sing Problems with similarity-based categorization - too flexible Like we can categorize based on different properties. Like a zebra can be similar to a horse due to form. Also a zebra can be similar to a barber sign due to its stripes - doesn’t account for transformation We can see that the dog is dressed as a panda. However, under prototype we will assume its similarity to a panda due to it resembling the idealized representation of a panda. Or using an exemplar view we would think that it is similar to a panda because we can think of different representations and see that they match. Knowledge-based categorization - explanatory relationship (theory) organizes categorization  ex) we have a cat and family that in the same category because we logically reason that they would all fit in things that we love Essentialism- under through knowledge based categorization - a belief that certain categories are natural kinds and have an underlying essence ex) we have an underlying belief plants start as seeds that eventually grow to look like a plant. Even though seeds don’t look like a mature plant we still believe that they are the same object Natural kinds - Objects that exist in the world independent of human behavior and beliefs 1) inductive potential - Allows for inferences about a wide variety of attributes and qualities - We can use our knowledge to guide our beliefs and expectations 2) Unalterable - Can not be changed Social essentialism - social grouping perceived to have the highest natural kind status.. Race Gender - ex) we have certain gender stereotypes and if we encounter stronger gender diversity Basically there are beliefs about different groups of people - essentialism beliefs contribute to persistence of stereotypes ex) we have certain gender stereotypes and if we encounter stronger gender diversity and someone has a strong essentialist belief they will discount those exemplars that don’t conform to their stereotypes ex) people might have a belief that black are good at sports - People might have this social essentialism that they will deny exemplars that disproves that some black people aren’t good at sport to prevent the upgrade of their category since their stubbornness for the social essentialism Does categorization influence perception? - bottom-up models of perception– NO These models have a strict boundary with perception and cognition If we were to perceive hillary from a bottom up it would be - 1) we pay attention to her - 2) perceive low level properties- contrast, shape, and color - 3) Make rapid structural encoding of the face= visual perception - 4) cognition where we categorize her (i.e., woman, senator, etc..) - Basically that perception occurs before cognition - interactive models of perception– YES Distinction between perception and cognition is more permeable Perception can unfold in a bottom up way with low level encoding and so on  Cognition can bias how we structural encode the face Perception is a process of categorization - Jerone Bruner His work motivated interactive models Argued that perception is a process of categorization Why perception was importation for categorization was that the way you see the word will be dependent of the letters next to it - representative function Mental representations match reality If mental representation don’t match reality we will stumble all the time - ex) if you have a mental representation of a water bottle and if it doesn’t match the reality of a water bottle it will cause problems when you go to drink from it Categorical placement of the object leads to appropriate consequences in terms of later behavior - If we can categorize an object as a water bottle we will know how to drink from it - predictive veridicality Perceptual categorization of an object or event permits one to “go beyond” the properties of the object or event perceived to a prediction of other properties of the object not yet tested - It allows us to go beyond information that is given - ex) if we know an image is michelle obama we can make inference of who took the image or where it was taken based on what we know about her - Cue utilization 1) primitive categorization - Sensory isolation of object or event with certain characteristic qualities - ex) even though there is a lot to look at you can focus on one object in particular and use its characteristics to categorize 2) cue search - Fit between the sensory cues and the specification of a category ex) if you have water bottle does it characteristics match what you have in mind If good fit: object or event seen with “phenomenal immediacy” If not a good fit: what is that? 3) Confirmation check - Search for additional confirmatory cues to check this category placement - Look for other details to see if it still matches the category 4) confirmation completion - Termination of cue search Openness to additional cues dramatically reduced Incongruent cues “gated out” You are no longer considering that that doesn’t match the category, you are officially locked into what you classified the object as On perceptual readiness (1957) - category accessibility The readiness with which a person classifies information according to a particular category Influenced by… - Fit between sensory input and category specification ex) the sensory information of a water bottle match the mental representation of what categorizes a water bottle - Motivations ex) if you are really thirsty you will see more things in your environment that match the category of a water bottle - Ease of retrieval- if you have a lot of experience with the category it will be easier to categorize it Motivations influence perceptions - brought in kids in the lab that were rich and poor and estimate the size of a quarter - found that the rich kids more accurately estimated the size of a quarter than the poor kids The reasoning behind this was that the poor children are motivated to see money as bigger because it’s something they didn’t have and valued more - they saw a game It was a footgame between princeton and dartmouth Researchers found that weather you were a princeton fan or dartmouth fan influenced the way in which team you believed caused the penalties Group membership and your motivations to see your group positively influence how you perceive - Balcetis and dunning Brought participants in a lab and said that if they saw a letter they had to drink the orange juice and if they see a number they have to drink a gross green smoothie Showed participants an ambiguous figure that quickly flashed, so she could know if the participants internal motivations motivated them to see one thing more than the other - The internal motivation in wanting to drink the orange juice and avoid the green smoothie will motivate them to see a letter - Balcetis and dunning pt.2 Also did another study where if they see a farm animal they eat the beans or if they see a sea animal they eat jelly beans Participants saw an ambiguous figure that flashed quickly She found that people were motivated to see a sea animal to avoid eating the beans and enjoy the jelly beans they will be influenced to see the image as a sea animal - political partisanship influences perceptions of skin tone They took images of obama and artificially darken or lightened his skin tone and asked which image was the real obama Found that obama supporters (75%) thought that the lighted images was obama and 25% saw it who were mcClain supporters  McClain supporters (89%) thought that the darker images were obama and 11% of obama supporters thought the darker images were obama If they saw the unaltered 60% obama supporters thought it was real image and 40% mcclain supporters thought it was the real image People in general in the population (white population) have negative stereotypes of african americans, so their prototypical representations of an african american would be a darker skin tone. So republicans were motivated to not see him positively, then they would see obama with a darker skin tone since it matches the negative stereotype Perception is impenetrable to cognition - can’t not see visual illusion - perceptual judgment is a step beyond perception - going back to caruso et al. Ratings of obama’s skin tone sufficient to determine if the ratings represent visual perception or cognitive judgment Republicans and conservatives rated images of obama with horns to be more “representative” than democrats or liberals Obama clearly does not have horns so not evidence for cognition influencing perception Obama realistically doesn’t have horns or a halo and people just want to say he has either one of them to discuss they they like him or not - This is motivation affecting perceptual judgment and not perception itself He argues that skin color was effect was not democrats seeing the skin color as lighter than it was or republicans seeing it darker than it was , but rather them saying it because they think it will reflect more positivity or negativity on obama Does Categorization influence perception - depends to some extent on how one defines perception - ambiguity matters Social situations tend to be ambiguous that leaves room for perception to be influenced - Ambiguity played a role in seeing how motivated influenced perception Skin color can ambiguous cause it can look different in different lights Lecture 6- Oct 16 Categorizing emotional expression - expression of the emotions in man and animals Charles darwin - Interested in how people categorize emotional expression - six basic emotions communicated by the face Paul Ekman  - Universal: people all around the world will express this emotions the same way and perceived the same way - Discrete : we think of the emotional expressions different from one another - Physiologically distinct : associated with different neurological processes - They are: anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happy, and sad - emotion perception is context dependent Aviezer et al (2008) - Superimposed facial emotional expressions onto people that were bodily expressing that emotion or another emotion - When the face was expressing sadness and the body was expressing sadness then people were more likely to distinguish that the person was sad - When the face wss expressing fear but the body was communicating sadness people were more likely to incorrectly categorize the emotion of the person - Conclusion: that people take emotion expression information from face and body Facial cues, body cues, and intense emotions - Aviezer et al (2012) Where people win or lose at a competitions in tennis they express intense emotions So tennis players that either won or lost had their photos were taken (facial emotional expression and body emotional expressions) They would superimpose facial expressions onto different facial bodily expressions Face of someone who won on a body that won people can easily see that the person was happy When it was face of a loser on a body that won then people were more likely to see people were happy Conclusion: shows that ekman’s idea that people can easily perceive emotions with just facial expressions is actually more complex as body expressions have an influence as well - emotional perception is context dependent How different events, body expressions, facial expressions, environment, etc can effect how you perceive the emotions of others - there are three primary ways we categorize people: race, gender, and age Rapid categorization: Race, Gender, Age - race, gender, age age detected within 200ms Important categorizes in social perception - Gender and age more primary than race? - according to evolutionary psychology ….YES Kurzba, tooby, and cosmides (2001)  - In evolutionary history, our ancestors would have encountered others where they categorize based on gender and ages - Ancestral hunter-gathers would travel on foot so traveling past 40 miles would be rare, so it would be hard for them to encounter other racial groups. So ancestors would typically see different genders and age, but not other racial groups. - From this perspective….race is simply one of the many cues for detecting coalitions and alliances (people use race to indicate if someone is in our group or not; but race is not a special form of categorization) - But - Race can be perceptually salient (like deferienciating different skin tones) - Historical (ex. colonization , slavery, segregation) have made race socially salient Do social categories influence face processing - other race effect “They all look alike” Harder time recognizing the personal identity of people of other racial and ethnic groups - explanations Perceptual expertise - Typically people grow up being surrounded by their own race so they aren’t used to perceiving other racial features - This means that they have a harder time telling apart other people from other races because of their lack of experience knowing their features Social cognitive processing - Own race = holistic If attend more to faces of people that look like us holistically we will have easier time perceiving their facial features But if we meet someone from another race we don’t attend to their face as much, we don’t holistically process that face making it harder to distinguish Typically we attend to faces of those with the same race as us - Other race = feature-based - context can also help us attend to other races but not in ways that we will be able to perceive their facial differences - contributes to biases in the criminal justice system - michel et al (2006) Composite face task (we are given upper half and lower half of a face and compare target face to probe face and figure out if the top half or lower half of a probe face matches the target face) - The white participants : when they looked at white faces they were much better at misaligned When they look at asian faces they do pretty much the same if the face is misaligned or aligned so it means they aren’t processing asian faces the same as white faces So they process white faces holistically but not the asian faces  - The asian participants They are much better at assigned misaligned faces than aligned no matter if they were white or asian This means that asian participants lived in a white majority country so they had a lot of experience of perceiving white faces Other group effect - hugenberg and cornielle (2009) Composite face task - Show participants the same faces and they are all white faces given white faces - Only change the group of the people - Done in miami (red) that has opps with marshall (green) - The faces were put on red background to have them perceive that they were miami students or green to have them perceive as marshall students - It showed that faces put on red background to indicated members of ingroup so they were holistically processed more than those made to be seen as members of outgroup Ingroup advantages in memory for faces - bernstein et al (2007) Faces were given faces that were put on red and green background and asked which is the miami students When the faces were put on background but the colors meant nothing for university correlation so the category labels were the same, but for the meaning given it had more recognition accuracy Together the studies suggest that it's not just perceptual expertise, but it is also memory can be influenced by the meaning given How do social categories interact to influence each other? - can novel group information override race? (van bavel et al., 2008:2011) Participants went into the lab and assigned to one of two teams (mixed raced teams of same number of white and black people on each team) Race was an irrelevant cue because it did not determine who was on your team Participants were put in mri and asked if images of people were on the team or not Study was interested if the fusiform face area was working to determine whos on team or Research found that if you have novel groups with same race numbered of people that we process ingroup more than outgroup, fusiform was equally on the race since it mattered more if the person was in the group or not or team membership, and no interaction  Evidence that social categories can influence each other if a novel category of team membership matters most so they aren’t processing race as much - Race can be a coalition cue but mainly irrelevant - but, override doesn’t mean perceptually erased Race is still encoded in the FFA (Ratner et al,. 2014) - Looking at the FFA and breaking it into different parts and seeing how they respond in those smaller parts - The patterns of activations in those smaller parts were different to race - This means that people that people were perceptual to the facial differences in the faces but those differences weren’t not important enough - override refers to downstream psychological consequences eg. racial bias - Race was not influencing the evaluation of their team members - suggesting that you may notice someone's race but what matters more is how they treat you, act, and if they are in the same team as you - a dynamic interactive theory of person construal You can process an individual in a bottom up process (encoding visual input and auditory input and based on it we can develop a representation of the face, body, and voice and that representation can activate different categories like age, race, gender. Those activation of categories can make salient to us different stereotypical and that salience can guide us on how we would act towards them in cognitive states You can also process top down (your cognitive states already have stereotypes Shows that certain categories can influence the availability of other categories that lead to representations Mouse-tracking method - Participants come into the lab and sit in front of a computer and do a task (see labels on top of a screen and a face appears and the goal is for the person to move their mouse as quickly as possible to categorize them) - As you move the mouse it keeps your mouse trajectory - If categories are interacting with one another it can suggest that male aggression stereotypes bias emotion categorization So that stereotype influences to think that the man is more angry than the women even if we overall think they are both happy - Black men may have a higher categorization for male than a white men because of the stereotypes of men being more aggressive and the stereotype of black men being more aggressive than white men What about categorization of multiracial people? - the US is getting more diverse 1 in 40 american identified as multiracial 70% of multiracial population then we form sensory memory → and if we think it is important that sensory memory is short-term memory → we are able to consolidate short memory to long-term memory (stored) We can access information from long-term memory for short-term memory to elaborate what we perceive about the short-term memory Sensory memory - sensory impression of stimulus information - decays rapidly