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I'm
interested in how sensory information is turned into
perceptions of other people—and the tentative perceptions
that may get partially computed 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. This involves examining the underlying
neural mechanisms that mediate these construals (using fMRI),
as well as the real-time evolution of the cognitive and
neural processing that gives rise to them (using computer
mouse-tracking and EEG/ERPs). Thus, my work investigates the cognitive
and neural basis of how people come to arrive at their
ultimate judgments of others, as well as the perceptual
underpinnings that permit these judgments in the first
place. I use a diverse set of methodologies to do
this, including computer mouse-tracking, fMRI, EEG/ERPs, as
well as traditional behavioral paradigms. I use these in
tandem with a variety of stimuli, ranging from percepts that
are precisely controlled using 3D facial synthesis and
morphing, or vocal manipulation, in combination with others
that are more naturalistically sampled from real people.
My research
often points to the idea that person perception
is a dynamic, interactive process. It's dynamic,
in that perceptions are gradually built up over hundreds of
milliseconds—in competition with other possible
perceptions—while continuously coordinating with
higher-order cognition
and action. It's also interactive, 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.
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