Functional and Temporal Considerations for Top-Down Influences in Social Perception

Perception has long been presumed to play an integral role in social cognition and subsequent behavior. Our inferences, judgments, and actions toward a person are of course driven by how we perceive that person. In light of developing views on the bidirectional interplay of cognitive and perceptual processes (Gilbert & Li, 2013), recent theory in social psychology has expanded and refined older theory (Bruner, 1957) to account for how top-down social processes, such as motivations and stereotypes, influence perceptual processing and its consequences (Adams, Ambady, Nakayama, & Shimojo, 2011; Balcetis & Lassiter, 2010; Stolier & Freeman, 2016a). Y. Jenny Xiao, G eraldine Coppin, and Jay J. Van Bavel (this issue) apply these advances to develop a model of intergroup relations through which top-down group-level processes, such as social identity and context, influence intergroup behavior through their impact on perception. For instance, resource allocation to racial outgroup members is influenced by the prototypicality of visual representations of their race (Krosch & Amodio, 2014). This model is the first to emphasize the meditational role of socially malleable perceptions upon intergroup relations. Xiao et al. emphasize that certain intergroup behaviors may be uniquely exacerbated by top-down modulated perceptions, such as resource scarcity impacting resource allocation by first altering face perception (e.g., Krosch & Amodio, 2014), in ways that would not occur were these perceptual modulations lacking. That is, exaggerated outgroup perceptions (e.g., perceived “Blackness”) have an influence on intergroup behavior over and above the merely cognitive biases of coalitional psychology (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001; Stephan & Stephan, 2000; Tajfel, 1974). Notably, the authors provide a broad review of observed top-down perceptual impacts that may trickle into intergroup behavior, spanning vision, audition, smell, taste, and touch. To date, the conversation concerning top-down influences in social perception has by and large focused upon vision (Adams et al., 2011; Balcetis & Lassiter, 2010). Xiao et al. bring the role of other sensory modalities to the foreground of perception, all which may play significant roles in behavior across the myriad contexts of modern intergroup interaction. The authors importantly note that there is a dearth of research regarding the link between top-down perceptual modulations and downstream behavior (such as intergroup behavior). Although some research has begun to test this relationship (e.g., Freeman, Pauker, & Sanchez, 2016; Krosch & Amodio, 2014; Ratner, Dotsch, Wigboldus, van Knippenberg, & Amodio, 2014), one crucial consideration for this research will be to causally examine these pathways. Indeed, it is possible that these effects may be correlational in nature, and perceptual modulations by social factors may not exaggerate behavior at all, nonetheless substantially. Therefore future studies should consider not only testing this pathway but also aiming to directly manipulate the presence of top-down perceptual influences to determine their role in downstream processes such as behavior. The aforementioned role of perception in mediating the relationship between intergroup psychology and behavior, like many recent models of social vision, by and large focuses on top-down influences on perceptual experience and judgment, for instance, shifts in the perception of a face’s pigmentation (Caruso, Mead, & Balcetis, 2009; Freeman, Penner, Saperstein, Scheutz, & Ambady, 2011b; Krosch & Amodio, 2014). Although this model specifies the impact of social factors on discrete and cross-modal perceptualprocessing systems (e.g., visual cortex, olfactory cortex, association cortex), it is agnostic to the functional nature and level of processing at which top-down perceptual influences occur within these systems (e.g., level of the visual processing hierarchy). Furthermore, these models are often agnostic to the temporal dynamics of topdown modulations. Indeed, much of top-down influence on visual processing is thought to occur across multiple levels of visual processing (Gilbert & Li, 2013), sometimes even only modulating a process temporarily before the process achieves a stable outcome. For instance, context may assist the speed of visual recognition of an object, such as a tool in a toolshed, without necessarily causing any stable shift in perception (Bar, 2004). In this commentary, we discuss the importance of the functional and temporal specificity of top-down effects in perceptual models of social behavior. First, we discuss the functional nature and level of processing at which these effects occur, as this largely determines the possibilities and potential for interventions. Second, we discuss the temporal dynamics of these effects, as they may lead to more psychologically and neurally plausible models of top-down social perception, and importantly uncover many instances in which these effects occur but are not observed inmeasures of final perceptual outcomes.