Naturalistic Person Perception

This course examines the psychological mechanisms that support naturalistic person perception—how people extract meaning from faces, voices, bodies, speech, and behavior to infer any number of characteristics about others, including their personality traits, emotions, mental states, or social group memberships. We will examine not only how these processes are driven by complex social cues but also how these processes are shaped by higher-order cognition—such as stereotypes, motivations, cultural learning, and social context. Moving beyond traditional laboratory tasks, the course will routinely engage with emerging approaches that study person perception in more naturalistic and high-dimensional ways. We will consider how perceptions and inferences about other people unfold over time during ongoing encounters and conversations, how perceivers integrate diverse cues into multidimensional representations of other people, and how these representations are studied using modern tools such as computational modeling, natural language processing, and deep learning models. Across the semester, we will span multiple levels of analysis—from perceptual and neural mechanisms to interpersonal outcomes—considering how person perception shapes phenomena such as interpersonal relationships, social decision-making, stereotyping and bias, and the formation of lasting impressions.