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Memory for incidentally perceived social cues: Effects on person judgment

Year: 2016

Type: article

Abstract: Dynamic face cues can be very salient, as when observing sudden shifts of gaze to a new location, or a change of expression from happy to angry. These highly salient social cues influence judgments of another person during the course of an interaction. However, other dynamic cues, such as pupil dilation, are much more subtle, affecting judgments of another person even without awareness. We asked whether such subtle, incidentally perceived, dynamic cues could be encoded in to memory and retrieved at a later time. The current study demonstrates that in some circumstances changes in pupil size in another person are indeed encoded into memory and influence judgments of that individual at a later time. Furthermore, these judgments interact with the perceived trustworthiness of the individual and the nature of the social context. The effect is somewhat variable, however, possibly reflecting individual differences and the inherent ambiguity of pupil dilation/constriction.

Source: British Journal of Psychology

DOI: 10.1111/bjop.12182

Authors: Ralph Pawling, Alexander J. Kirkham, Steven P. Tipper, Harriet Over

Institutions: Liverpool John Moores University, University of York

Language: English

Topic: Face Recognition and Perception

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Awards: G4722114749, Visuomotor states of an observer influence person perception: The critical role of emotion