Biomedical subjects

Alexander Todorov

Publications and source records attributed to Alexander Todorov.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Spontaneous retrieval of affective person knowledge in face perception.

In a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, we explored whether affective person knowledge based on memories formed from minimal information is spontaneously retrieved in face perception. In the first stage of the experiment, participants were presented with 120 unfamiliar faces. Each face was presented with a description of one of four types of behaviors: aggressive, disgusting, neutral, and nice. In the second stage, participants were scanned while engaged in a one-back recognition task in which they saw the faces that were associated with behaviors and 30 novel faces. Although this task is a simple perceptual task that neither demands person evaluation nor retrieval of person knowledge, neural responses to faces differed as a function of the behaviors. Faces associated with behaviors evoked stronger activity than did novel faces in regions implicated in social cognition--anterior paracingulate cortex and superior temporal sulcus. Explicit memory for the behaviors enhanced the neural response in these regions. Faces associated with disgusting behaviors evoked stronger activity in left anterior insula than did faces associated with aggressive behaviors. This effect was equally strong for faces associated with explicitly recalled behaviors and faces associated with non-recalled behaviors. The findings suggest that affective person knowledge acquired from minimal information is spontaneously retrieved in face perception, engaging neural systems for analysis of social cognition and emotions.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2006

Toward socially inspired social neuroscience.

Social neuroscience, often viewed as studying the neural foundations of social cognition, has roots in multiple disciplines. This paper argues that it needs a firmer base in social psychology. First, we outline some major opportunities from social psychology--the power of social context and social motives in shaping human behavior. Second, as the social cognition field moves away from studying only deliberate, explicit processes to studying also automatic, implicit processes, adopting a dual-process perspective, social neuroscience also lends itself to both automatic and controlled processes. Finally, social neuroscience is especially suited to study the efficiency and spontaneity of social judgments. All this brings social behavioral grounding to cognitive neuroscience. Among the implications for social neuroscience: Social cognition intrinsically evokes affect, so social cognitive affective neuroscience glues together a variety of fields in psychological and neurosciences.

Cognition↗

PubMed2006

First impressions: making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face.

People often draw trait inferences from the facial appearance of other people. We investigated the minimal conditions under which people make such inferences. In five experiments, each focusing on a specific trait judgment, we manipulated the exposure time of unfamiliar faces. Judgments made after a 100-ms exposure correlated highly with judgments made in the absence of time constraints, suggesting that this exposure time was sufficient for participants to form an impression. In fact, for all judgments-attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence, and aggressiveness-increased exposure time did not significantly increase the correlations. When exposure time increased from 100 to 500 ms, participants' judgments became more negative, response times for judgments decreased, and confidence in judgments increased. When exposure time increased from 500 to 1,000 ms, trait judgments and response times did not change significantly (with one exception), but confidence increased for some of the judgments; this result suggests that additional time may simply boost confidence in judgments. However, increased exposure time led to more differentiated person impressions.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Attributions on the brain: neuro-imaging dispositional inferences, beyond theory of mind.

People need to predict what other people will do, and the other person's perceived disposition is the preferred mode of prediction. People less often use, for example, shared social norms to explain another person's behavior. Social psychology's last half-century of research on attribution theory offers precise, validated paradigms for testing how people think about other people's minds. Neuro-imaging data from one classic attribution paradigm shows the unique priority given to inferring chronic, idiosyncratic dispositions (unique attitudes, individual personality, idiosyncratic intent), compared to other kinds of mental contents. Specifically, sentences describing behavior that is low in consensus across actors, low in distinctiveness across entities, and high in consistency over time (compared with the other 7 low-high combinations) uniquely elicits (a) person attributions and (b) activation in the superior temporal sulcus. Ignoring consensus, both low-distinctiveness, high-consistency combinations (compared to 6 remaining combinations) also activate the MPFC, consistent with decades of behavioral data showing that general social cognition neglects consensus information. Thus, activated areas converge with prior neuro-imaging data on theory of mind and social cognition, but more precisely isolate the exact nature of the inferences that activate these areas.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes.

We show that inferences of competence based solely on facial appearance predicted the outcomes of U.S. congressional elections better than chance (e.g., 68.8% of the Senate races in 2004) and also were linearly related to the margin of victory. These inferences were specific to competence and occurred within a 1-second exposure to the faces of the candidates. The findings suggest that rapid, unreflective trait inferences can contribute to voting choices, which are widely assumed to be based primarily on rational and deliberative considerations.

Aging↗

PubMed2005

Believe it or not: on the possibility of suspending belief.

We present two experiments that cast doubt on existing evidence suggesting that it is impossible to suspend belief in a comprehended proposition. In Experiment 1, we found that interrupting the encoding of a statement's veracity decreased memory for the statement's falsity when the false version of the statement was uninformative, but not when the false version was informative. This suggests that statements that are informative when false are not represented as if they were true. In Experiment 2, participants made faster lexical decisions to words implied by preceding statements when they were told that the statements were true than when the veracity of the statements was unknown or when the statements were false. The findings suggest that comprehending a statement may not require believing it, and that it may be possible to suspend belief in comprehended propositions.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

The person reference process in spontaneous trait inferences.

Five studies examined whether spontaneous trait inferences uniquely reference the person who performed a trait-implying behavior. On each study trial in 5 studies, participants saw 2 faces and a behavioral sentence referring to one of them. Later, participants saw face-trait pairs and indicated whether they had seen the trait word in the sentence presented with the face. Participants falsely recognized implied traits more when these traits were paired with actors' faces than with control faces. This effect was replicated for a large set effaces (120), after a week delay between study and recognition test, when equal attention was paid to each face, and when the orientation of the face at recognition was different from the orientation at encoding.

Humans↗

PubMed2002

Spontaneous trait inferences are bound to actors' faces: evidence from a false recognition paradigm.

A false recognition paradigm showed that spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) are bound to the person performing a trait-implying behavior. In 6 experiments, participants memorized faces and behavioral sentences. When faces were paired with implied traits in a recognition test, participants falsely recognized these traits more often than unrelated traits paired with the same faces or the same traits paired with familiar faces. The effect was obtained for a large set of behaviors (120). each presented for 5 s, and for behaviors that participants did not subsequently recognize or recall. Antonyms of the implied traits were falsely recognized less often than unrelated traits, suggesting that STIs have extended implications. Explicit person-trait judgments predicted both false recognition and response times for implied traits.

Face↗