Bridging the Gap between Spontaneous Behavior- and Stereotype-based Impressions

This chapter explores the largely parallel progressions of person memory and stereotyping research in social cognition, with particular focus on spontaneous inferences drawn from descriptions of behavior or social group membership. We consider the potential benefits of several potential empirical intersections for theory and for a more open and inclusive psychological science.

Person Memory Mechanism Underlying Approach and Avoidance Judgments of Social Targets

People display approach and avoidance tendencies toward social targets. Although much research has studied the factors that affect decisions to approach or avoid targets, less work has investigated whether cognitive factors, such as episodic memory (e.g., details remembered about others from previous encounters) contribute to such judgments. Across two experiments, participants formed positive or negative impressions of targets based on their picture, a trait-implying behavior (Experiments 1 & 2), and their political ideology (conservative or liberal; Experiment 2). Memory and approach/avoidance decisions for targets were then measured. Results showed remembering negative impressions about targets increased avoidance responses, whereas remembering positive impressions increased approach responses. Strikingly, falsely remembering negative impressions for novel social targets (not seen before) also induced avoidance. Results suggest remembering negative information about targets, whether correctly or falsely, strongly influences future social judgments. Overall, these data support an episodic memory mechanism underlying subsequent approach/avoidance judgments, which is a rich area for future research.

don de la siesta

Miguel Ángel Hernández aborda la siesta como una resistencia en lo cotidiano. Incluyendo teoría, literatura, arte y autobiografía (pues el autor se nos presenta como un buen practicante de estas siestas), nos vemos sumergidos en un mapa de referencias sobre el sesteo que son miradas desde la situación actual de crisis sanitaria. Su escritura tiene la capacidad de, alguna forma, bajar a nuestros contextos, creando en el lector una sensación de común, de lazos culturales y vínculos sociales marcados por la necesidad de volver a pensar desde este momento de descanso colectivo (aunque cada uno lo practique en su casa) tras el mediodía. En esta reseña nos centraremos especialmente en su forma de entrelazar este ejercicio de memoria en primera persona con referencias artísticas y teóricas, siendo coherente con un formato de escritura basado en anotaciones mucho más horizontales y abiertas que una investigación rigurosamente acotada. Miguel Ángel Hernández approaches the nap as a resistance in the everyday. Including theory, literature, art and autobiography (as the author presents himself as a good practitioner of these naps), we are immersed in a map of references on napping that are looked at from the current health crisis situation. His writing has the capacity to come down to our contexts, creating in the reader a sense of commonality, of cultural ties and social links marked by the need to rethink from this moment of collective rest (even if each one practices it at home) after midday. In this review we will focus especially on his way of interweaving this exercise of first-person memory with artistic and theoretical references, being coherent with a writing format based on annotations that are much more horizontal and open than a rigorously bounded investigation.

Implicit person memory: Domain-general and domain-specific processes of learning and change

In this chapter, we review implicit person memory: studies using implicit measures to examine how evaluations of and beliefs about individual human targets are acquired and how they shift in the face of new information. In doing so we distinguish between papers that have (a) used implicit person memory as a case study of relatively domain-general processes in the acquisition and change of implicit evaluations and beliefs vs. (b) investigated implicit person memory by attempting to identify processes specific to learning about social targets. The former subset of implicit person memory work emphasizes questions about the inputs to implicit attitude acquisition and change (e.g., approach/avoidance training, evaluative conditioning, and verbal statements) and the features of such inputs relevant to updating (e.g., co-occurrence vs. relational information). By contrast, the themes emerging from the second, more uniquely social, subset of implicit person memory work include the interplay between individual-level and category-level information, the role of facial cues, diagnostic narrative information, and the reinterpretation of previously encountered behavioral evidence about a person. Against this general theoretical backdrop as well as the apparent contradiction between the two sets of empirical studies, we ask whether a domain-specific account of implicit person memory is worth proposing and defending. We also address other topics that are yet to be settled in this area. These topics include differing definitions of what it means for a learning process to be effective, conditions of encoding, and probably the thorniest issue of all: the content and format of the mental representations mediating implicit person memory and, more generally, implicit social cognition.

A fast link between face perception and memory in the temporal pole

The question of how the brain recognizes the faces of familiar individuals has been important throughout the history of neuroscience. Cells linking visual processing to person memory have been proposed, but not found. Here we report the discovery of such cells through recordings from an fMRI-identified area in the macaque temporal pole. These cells responded to faces when they were personally familiar. They responded non-linearly to step-wise changes in face visibility and detail, and holistically to face parts, reflecting key signatures of familiar face recognition. They discriminated between familiar identities, as fast as a general face identity area. The discovery of these cells establishes a new pathway for the fast recognition of familiar individuals.

Ekphrastic Self and the Dream House of (Re)Collection: Ishiguro’s ‘Artist’ in a ‘Floating World’

This paper examines the text’s material memory despite aesthetic ‘forgetfulness’ in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating Word. Repurposing traditional notions of ekphrasis—the literary description of visual art—to better understand the modern process of self-making, this essay offers Ishiguro’s ‘ekphrastic occasion’ as a tangible remnant that disrupts ideas of objectivity just as it fabricates them. Further, it claims that subjective narrative, such as first-person memory or vivid individual portraiture, often functions as a palpable archive even as it seeks to obfuscate the idea of an objective archive. In this way, material description, rather than adhering to Sebald’s post-war ideal of “unpretentious objectivity,” becomes instead a nuanced site of heightened subjectivity (The Natural History of Destruction 53). We see the “play of writing and reading the world” as an insistently fraught and self-conscious endeavor (Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto 152). Along these theoretical lines, this argument seeks to harness the idea of a ‘sentient’ archive to reframe the traditional relation between object (the novel) and subject (the reader) as one of mutual animation, breath, and correspondence.