Person perception and social cognition

Human social perception, communication, and interaction all require the efficient analysis and representation of person-related information. Faces or voices convey a large variety of socially relevant information, including a person's identity, emotions, gender, age, attractiveness, ethnic group, or focus of attention. However, perceptual mechanisms for processing such complex social stimuli have only recently become the focus of more systematic research. This development was arguably facilitated (1) by the availability of sophisticated stimulus manipulation techniques (e.g., image-, video-, and voice-morphing, caricaturing, and averaging) allowing researchers to create completely naturalistic person stimuli in which perceptual social cues are nevertheless under precise experimental control, and (2) by the availability of methods from the cognitive and social neurosciences. Here we review the current status of the field of person perception. In doing so, we discuss selected examples of highly active areas of research and show how person perception currently has developed into a central topic within psychological research. Evidence is emerging to suggest that perceptual social cues in faces or voices are not only spontaneously used to promote first impressions about people, but also that such impressions can show a degree of validity, suggesting that faces or voices can be seen as windows to the person behind. Accordingly, we argue that progress in other fields of social cognition that deal with real or virtual agents (e.g., theory of mind research, social categorization, human decision-making) will be enhanced by considering more strongly the influences of perceptual facial or vocal person information.