Abstract
A growing body of literature has begun to study the neural dynamics of person perception when people are asked to integrate social information from several domains simultaneously as opposed to studying how person perception is affected by appearance, behavioral, or non-verbal cues separately. Previous fMRI work has revealed the role of the dorsal-medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) in updating social information, showing greater dmPFC activation for incongruent compared to congruent social and emotional information (Cassidy & Gutchess, in press). However, the neural mechanism involved in the updating of face- and behavior-based impressions has not been elucidated in a way that can capture the temporal dynamics of impression formation processes. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore how incongruent versus congruent face-behavior information is processed as a function of the amplitude of the N400, an ERP component traditionally involved in semantic processing. Participants viewed faces (varying on degree of trustworthiness) paired with behavioral sentences (reflecting positive or negative character), which allowed us to identify the neural activity underlying the processing of both congruent and incongruent face-behavior relationships involved in social cognition by time-locking the presentation of the congruent and incongruent stimuli. ERP analyses indicate that when presented with incongruent face-behavior information, the amplitude of the N400 increases anteriorly compared to congruent face-behavior information. This suggests that when confronted with conflicting information about a person’s facial characteristics and behavior, frontal networks may be recruited to resolve this incongruency.