Skip navigation
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01r781wg05s
Title: More than a face: Interactions between visual and non-visual social knowledge
Authors: Verosky, Sara
Advisors: Todorov, Alexander
Contributors: Psychology Department
Keywords: face learning
facial identity
fMRI adaptation
multi-voxel pattern analysis
overgeneralization
perceptual similarity
Subjects: Social psychology
Neurosciences
Psychology
Issue Date: 2012
Publisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University
Abstract: Although we represent other people in terms of both what they look like and how they behave, these two aspects of person knowledge have rarely been studied together. While vision scientists have focused on the processing of faces and bodies, social psychologists have focused on the cognitive construal of others. In this dissertation, I present a series of experiments that aim to better understand how we think about other people by considering how we combine visual and non-visual knowledge in our person representations. In particular, these experiments focus on one type of interaction between visual and non-visual social knowledge: the influence of social knowledge on face perception. In the first part of the dissertation, I demonstrate that rapidly learned affective associations generalize to perceptually similar but novel faces. In the second part, I examine the mechanisms underlying this type of learning generalization. In the last part of the dissertation, I present evidence from fMRI that different facial identities are associated with unique patterns of neural activity in ventral visual cortex and I examine the influence of social knowledge on these representations. Together, these data suggest that what we know about others can change the way we see their faces.
URI: http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01r781wg05s
Alternate format: The Mudd Manuscript Library retains one bound copy of each dissertation. Search for these copies in the library's main catalog
Type of Material: Academic dissertations (Ph.D.)
Language: en
Appears in Collections:Psychology

Files in This Item:
File Description SizeFormat 
Verosky_princeton_0181D_10159.pdf5.26 MBAdobe PDFView/Download


Items in Dataspace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.