I'm interested in how sensory information gets turned into basic perceptions of other people—and the tentative perceptions that may get partially considered along the way. My work, then, looks at how the person perception process evolves over time and how, during this process, multiple perceptual cues (most importantly facial cues, but also cues of the voice and body) are rapidly integrated into coherent construals of others. To explore these questions, I use the continuous hand movements that lead up to perceivers' ultimate responses (using a computer mouse-tracking technique), in addition to event-related brain potentials, and other behavioral paradigms (e.g., subjective judgments, priming). I also use fMRI to explore the neural mechanisms underlying snap judgments  of other people, and the neural encoding and representation of face information. I advocate for an interactive, dynamic person perception process. It's temporally dynamic, in that perceptions are gradually built up over hundreds of milliseconds (in competition with other possible perceptions) while continuously interacting with cognition and action. It's also functionally dynamic, in that top-down factors (e.g., context, prior knowledge, stereotypes, one's learned cultural environment, one's motivations) fluidly interact with bottom-up sensory information to shape the basic ways we see and understand other people. My approach incorporates insights and techniques across social and cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and dynamical frameworks in cognitive science, which I hope will enhance the overall quality of the research.


>> If you are a researcher interested in using mouse-tracking, please see here for my mouse-tracking software.