Perceptual routes to social understanding, Christine Looser

Christine Looser
Minerva Schools at KGI & Harvard University

Perceptual routes to social understanding

Understanding the thoughts and feelings of those around us is crucial for building social bonds. However, people lack direct access to others’ minds and regularly use perceptual cues to infer others’ mental states. In this talk, I outline how perceptual cues are analyzed for social meaning and explore how this process impacts the way we judge others’ mental states. In the first part of the talk, I will present behavioral and neural evidence in the domain of face perception to demonstrate that translating visual cues into social meaning occurs in two stages: a rapid, indiscriminate pattern-matching process that detects face configurations, followed by a slower more sustained stage wherein faces are scrutinized for mind detection. In the second part of the talk, I explore the consequences of relying on perceptual cues to understand others’ minds. In particular, I will present data on self-other biases in the evaluation of physical and mental experiences. Together these results suggest people rely on perceptual cues to understand others’ minds, but doing so subverts their ability to understand those minds accurately