| A dynamic interactive framework for person construal is proposed. It argues that the perception of other people is accomplished by a dynamical system involving continuous interaction between social categories, stereotypes, high-level cognitive states, and the low-level processing of facial, vocal, and bodily cues. This system permits lower-level sensory perception and higher-order social cognition to dynamically coordinate across multiple interactive levels of processing to give rise to stable person construals. A recurrent connectionist model of this system is described, which accounts for a wide range of experimental findings from a computer mouse-tracking technique that examines social categorization in real time. These include evidence for a) continuously evolving category representations and a dynamic competition process underlying categorization (Studies 1--4); b) continuous face-voice interaction during categorization (Studies 5--6), and c) the continuous top-down influence of stereotype activations on categorization (Studies 7--8). Together, across 8 studies, mouse-tracking and computational simulations provide converging evidence for the dynamic and interactive nature of person construal. Implications and new predictions arising from this framework are discussed. |
