PSYC 51.15 Social Perception
In a fleeting glance, we can identify a person, infer their emotional state, determine their gender, estimate their age, assess their attractiveness, and surmise the focus of their thoughts. Social perception is fundamental to social interaction in humans as well as other animals. This course will examine social perception in humans and other species and in doing so will touch on issues including functional specialization, neurocognitive development, and evolution. Faces have received much of the attention in social perception and we’ll spend significant time on face perception, but we’ll also cover body perception, biological motion perception, voice perception, and some of the various types of social perception in non-human animals. We will draw on a range of approaches including psychophysics, neuropsychology, single-cell recording, transcranial magnetic stimulation, fMRI, and twin studies.