C3N Seminar
A Domain-General Neural Mechanism for High-Dimensional Social Perception
Jon Freeman, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychology
Columbia University
People form a rich set of inferences about other people, ranging from social categories (e.g., gender, race), personality traits (e.g., trustworthiness, dominance), and mental states (e.g., afraid, puzzled). Across behavioral and neuroimaging work, we show that social perception is not a passive extraction of visual features onto a fixed set of universal social dimensions, but a constructive and high-dimensional process shaped by conceptual expectations and higher-order social cognition. Even from a brief glimpse of a face, people spontaneously map others onto multidimensional spaces coding for social categories, personality traits, and mental states which we find implicitly encoded through regions involved in domain-general concept activation and more explicitly encoded through larger cortical systems involved in deliberate social representation. Besides bottom-up perceptual cues, top-down social expectations also have an important role in shaping perceptions. We find that expectations derived from social-conceptual associations systematically distort neural representational geometry, influencing how categories, emotions, traits, and even socially-relevant objects are visually perceived. Together, these findings suggest a domain-general mechanism linking multiple forms of social perception to non-social perception, which allows our perceptions of others to be structured yet flexible—both adaptively and maladaptively—to preconceived beliefs about the social world.
Pardes Building, Boardroom, 6th Floor, Room 6601, and via Zoom
