Review
More Than Meets the Eye: Split-Second Social Perception

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Trends

Recent research shows that visual perceptions of the social categories of others are not only highly sensitive to bottom-up facial features but are also affected by higher-order social cognitive factors (e.g., stereotypes, attitudes, and goals).

Emerging work suggests a rapid and flexible integration among multiple bottom-up visual cues and top-down social cognitive processes – a process that often triggers ‘hidden’ social category activations that are not observed in explicit perceptual judgments.

Aspects of the initial perception process itself appear to drive important downstream social consequences (e.g., evaluative biases or politicians’ electoral success) independently of the outcomes of that process.

Recent studies point to a key network comprised of the fusiform gyrus, orbitofrontal cortex, and anterior temporal lobe in helping to form flexible social perceptions through an integration of facial cues and top-down social-conceptual information.

Recent research suggests that visual perception of social categories is shaped not only by facial features but also by higher-order social cognitive processes (e.g., stereotypes, attitudes, goals). Building on neural computational models of social perception, we outline a perspective of how multiple bottom-up visual cues are flexibly integrated with a range of top-down processes to form perceptions, and we identify a set of key brain regions involved. During this integration, ‘hidden’ social category activations are often triggered which temporarily impact perception without manifesting in explicit perceptual judgments. Importantly, these hidden impacts and other aspects of the perceptual process predict downstream social consequences – from politicians’ electoral success to several evaluative biases – independently of the outcomes of that process.

Section snippets

Visual Perception of Social Categories

Based upon the mere glimpse of another individual, knowledge about that person's gender, race, and other social categories seems to spring to mind spontaneously. The visual construal of social categories feels instantaneous and immediate, as if it were a direct product of ‘reading’ visible facial cues. This experience of social perception aligns with early research on the topic, which emphasized its automatic, immediate, and unavoidable nature 1, 2, 3.

A considerable body of research has shown

Malleability and Bias of Initial Perceptions

Perceivers are highly sensitive not only to discrete social categories of faces but also to within-category variation in their cues (e.g., gender or racial typicality). Such variation impacts initial categorizations 8, 9, stereotype activation 10, 11 and application [12], evaluative judgments [13], and other interpersonal behaviors. For instance, more prototypically Black faces more strongly activate Black-related stereotypes, and this portends harsher criminal sentences [14] including capital

A Landscape of Hidden Social Categories

Social targets inhabit multiple categories simultaneously (e.g., young Asian female). Classic work suggested this ‘multiple category problem’ is solved by only one dominant category coming to the fore, while others are actively suppressed 38, 39. Recent research, however, reveals that multiple categories both across and within dimensions coexist throughout processing 4, 40. Although perceiver judgments stabilize on a single categorization rapidly, numerous ‘hidden’ categories are concurrently

Inherent Intersection of Social Categories

Social category dimensions were historically considered to be processed in isolation, but recent studies have demonstrated their inherently intersectional nature. For example, the DI model (Figure 1) predicts that multiple social categories will be perceived interdependently when stereotypes related to two ostensibly unrelated categories overlap. This is because the processing of one category dimension (e.g., gender) will activate stereotypes that in turn bias the perception of other category

A Neural Network for Flexible Social Perception

As outlined above, recent behavioral studies point to a split-second social perception process that involves flexible integration of multiple bottom-up visual cues and top-down social cognitive factors – a process that often involves the hidden triggering of multiple category activations that impact perception. At the neural level, extant research suggests that a network of three regions is important for this process, the FG, OFC, and the anterior temporal lobe (ATL), which are all densely

Concluding Remarks

Traditional approaches have emphasized that visual construal of the social categories of other people reflects an automatic ‘read-out’ of facial features, which thereafter unleashes a linear chain of events from initial perceptions up to higher-order processes. In light of current evidence, we argue here that initial social perceptions are, in fact, hardly ‘initial’. They reflect a dynamic cascade of interactive influences, wherein factors that were long presumed to be downstream products of

Acknowledgments

This work was funded in part by National Science Foundation research grant NSF-BCS-1423708 (J.B.F).

Glossary

Attitudes
a positive or negative evaluation related to a social category (or person, object, thing, or event).
Attractors
a state toward which a dynamical system tends to evolve.
Computational model
a mathematical model used to study the behavior of complex systems. Neural computational models provide an algorithmic and process-level description of cognition using core principles of information processing in neural systems.
Effective connectivity
analyses that use statistical models of functional

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