Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition.

Since the early twentieth century, psychologists have known that there is consensus in attributing social and personality characteristics from facial appearance. Recent studies have shown that surprisingly little time and effort are needed to arrive at this consensus. Here we review recent research on social attributions from faces. Section I outlines data-driven methods capable of identifying the perceptual basis of consensus in social attributions from faces (e.g., What makes a face look threatening?). Section II describes nonperceptual determinants of social attributions (e.g., person knowledge and incidental associations). Section III discusses evidence that attributions from faces predict important social outcomes in diverse domains (e.g., investment decisions and leader selection). In Section IV, we argue that the diagnostic validity of these attributions has been greatly overstated in the literature. In the final section, we offer an account of the functional significance of these attributions.

Previous research argued that stereotypes differ primarily on the 2 dimensions of warmth/communion and competence/agency. We identify an empirical gap in support for this notion. The theoretical model constrains stereotypes a priori to these 2 dimensions; without this constraint, participants might spontaneously employ other relevant dimensions. We fill this gap by complementing the existing theory-driven approaches with a data-driven approach that allows an estimation of the spontaneously employed dimensions of stereotyping. Seven studies (total N = 4,451) show that people organize social groups primarily based on their agency/socioeconomic success (A), and as a second dimension, based on their conservative-progressive beliefs (B). Communion (C) is not found as a dimension by its own, but rather as an emergent quality in the two-dimensional space of A and B, resulting in a 2D ABC model of stereotype content about social groups. (PsycINFO Database Record

Reverse correlation (RC) techniques provide a data-driven approach to model internal representations in an unconstrained way. Here, we used this approach to model social perception of faces. In the RC task, participants repeatedly selected from two face images—created by superimposing randomly generated noise masks on the same face—the face that looked most trustworthy (or, in other conditions: untrustworthy, dominant, or submissive). We calculated classification images (CIs) by averaging all selected images. Trait judgments of independent participants, as well as objective metrics, showed that the CIs visualized the intended traits well. Furthermore, tests of pixel clusters showed that diagnostic information resided mostly in mouth, eye, eyebrow, and hair regions. The current work shows that RC provides an excellent tool to extract psychologically meaningful images that map onto social perception.

The base face was the neutral male mean of the Averaged Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database (Lundqvist & Litton, 1998). The noise consisted of 60 superimposed sinusoid images: 6 orientations (01, 301, 601, 901, 1201, and 1501) Â 5 spatial frequencies (1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 cycles per image) Â 2 phases (0, p/2), with random contrasts.