ABSTRACT
Person perception is concerned with one persons attempts to understand what another person is really like inside. The act of person perception involves numerous, interrelated processes unfolding over time. It can be considered at the individual or group level. The most important source of information relevant for person perception is the human face. The N170 component is of special interest for person perception research because it presumably reflects the initial process of recognizing that an object is a conspecific the earliest stage of social perception. The primary purpose of person perception is to create expectancies about other people's behavior, which then guide our decisions and behaviors with respect to those others in an effective way. Early social neuroscience research appeared to support such a dual-process framework by suggesting that the neural substrates supporting reflexive and reflective processes were separable. Application of the methods and theory of cognitive neuroscience has dramatically advanced understanding of a number of aspects of person perception.
