title: A Bayesian approach to person perception.
abstract: Here we propose a Bayesian approach to person perception, outlining the theoretical position and a methodological framework for testing the predictions experimentally. We use the term person perception to refer not only to the perception of others' personal attributes such as age and sex but also to the perception of social signals such as direction of gaze and emotional expression. The Bayesian approach provides a formal description of the way in which our perception combines current sensory evidence with prior expectations about the structure of the environment. Such expectations can lead to unconscious biases in our perception that are particularly evident when sensory evidence is uncertain. We illustrate the ideas with reference to our recent studies on gaze perception which show that people have a bias to perceive the gaze of others as directed towards themselves. We also describe a potential application to the study of the perception of a person's sex, in which a bias towards perceiving males is typically observed.
authors: School of Psychology, UNSW Australia, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Electronic address: colin.clifford@unsw.edu.au.
authors: C W G
authors: CW
authors: Clifford
authors: School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Psychology, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK.
authors: I
authors: I
authors: Mareschal
authors: School of Psychology, UNSW Australia, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; Faculty of Law and Letters, Ehime University, Matsuyama, Ehime, Japan.
authors: Y
authors: Y
authors: Otsuka
authors: School of Social Sciences and Psychology, The University of Western Sydney, Bankstown, New South Wales, Australia.
authors: T L
authors: TL
authors: Watson
mesh_terms: D001499:Bayes Theorem; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D011287:Prejudice; D012938:Social Perception
keywords: Adaptation; Gaze perception; Male bias; Norm-based coding; Perceptual inference; Social vision