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A matter of considerable debate is whether people spontaneously use categorical knowledge (i.e., stereotypes) to guide their interactions with others. Despite initial evidence for the unconditional automaticity of category activation, recent research has identified a range of factors that moderate this process. Extending this line of inquiry, the current investigation explored the extent to which contextual influences - specifically the order in which priming stimuli are presented to participants - may modulate person categorization. Using a standard semantic-priming paradigm to index category and stereotype activation, participants were presented with priming stimuli that were either intermixed or blocked by sex. The results revealed that: (i) category and stereotype activation are moderated by the order in which priming stimuli are presented; and (ii) priming effects decrease monotonically as a function of category repetition. The theoretical implications of these findings are considered.

A primary focus of research undertaken by social psychologists is to establish why perceivers fail to accurately adopt or understand other people's perspectives. From overestimating the dispositional bases of behavior to misinterpreting the motivations of out-group members, the message that emerges from this work is that social perception is frequently imperfect. In contrast, researchers from disciplines outside social psychology seek to identify the strategies and skill sets required to successfully understand other people's perspectives. These investigations attempt to identify the mechanisms through which perceivers intuit mental states that underlie behavior (e.g. wants, motivations, beliefs). In this article, we review findings from perspective-taking research in developmental psychology, primatology (i.e. primate cognition) and cognitive neuroscience. We then discuss why understanding how accurate perspective-taking occurs may inform understanding of when and why this process fails.

The temporal coordination of behavior during dyadic interactions is a foundation for effective social exchange with synchronized actions enhancing perceptions of rapport and interpersonal connectedness. What has yet to be established, however, are the precise characteristics of behavioral coordination that give rise to such effects. Informed by a dynamical systems approach, the current investigation considered whether judgments of rapport are influenced by the mode of interpersonal synchrony. In two experiments, participants rated the degree of rapport manifest by a simulated pair of walkers exhibiting various configurations of synchronized strides. The results revealed that the highest levels of rapport were associated with the most stable forms of interpersonal coordination (i.e., in-phase and anti-phase synchrony), regardless of whether coordination between the walkers was conveyed via the presentation of visual (Expt. 1a) or auditory (Expt. 1b) cues. These findings underscore the importance of interpersonal coordination to core aspects of social perception.

AbstractChildren and adults were tested on a forced‐choice face recognition task in which the direction of eye gaze was manipulated over the course of the initial presentation and subsequent test phase of the experiment. To establish the effects of gaze direction on the encoding process, participants were presented with to‐be‐studied faces displaying either direct or deviated gaze (i.e. encoding manipulation). At test, all the faces depicted persons with their eyes closed. To investigate the effects of gaze direction on the efficiency of the retrieval process, a second condition (i.e. retrieval manipulation) was run in which target faces were presented initially with eyes closed and tested with either direct or deviated gaze. The results revealed the encoding advantages enjoyed by faces with direct gaze was present for both children and adults. Faces with direct gaze were also recognized better than faces with deviated gaze at retrieval, although this effect was most pronounced for adults. Finally, the advantage for direct gaze over deviated gaze at encoding was greater than the advantage for direct gaze over deviated gaze at retrieval. We consider the theoretical implications of these findings.