Dr. Kyle Ratner
Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences
UC Santa Barbara

Visualizing “Us” and “Them” 
Most social psychology research on face processing focuses on direct visual perception. However, people regularly visualize faces when the people they are thinking about are not in front of them. Research from my lab suggests that merely sharing a novel group membership with another person can bias how one visualizes that person’s face. In the current talk, I will discuss recent attempts to understand individual differences in this phenomenon and psychological processes through which group biases in face visualization could occur. This work provides new insight into how people mentally represent group members and adds to a growing literature on how social factors influence face processing.

This lecture is made possible in part by a generous Endowment by the family of Allen. L. Edwards.