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Serial dependence of social evaluations in brain and behavior
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Description: Serial dependence (SD) is the attraction of perception towards instances of an object seen in the recent past. This phenomenon occurs both in low-level vision (orientation, direction), mid-level vision (shape) and high-level vision (faces, composite objects). The goal of the current study is to measure whether social evaluations are serially dependent. The content of stereotypes has been proposed to be explained by two axes: competence and warmth. Different social groups can be located in this two-dimensional space, and clusters corresponding to independent combinations of high/low competence and warmth can be identified (Fiske et al, 2002; Cuddy et al, 2009; Fiske, 2018). The two axes are thus purported to be psychologically independent. If this is the case, then we expect serial dependence to operate independently along each axis. If the two axes are not independent, then there will be more serial dependence on one axis in case of higher proximity on the other axis. The first goal of this study is to determine whether high-level evaluations are subject to serial dependence similarly to what has been shown for visual features. The second is to use serial dependence as a diagnostic tool about the psychological separability of the two axes (competence and warmth). Furthermore, we will record EEG while participants are performing the social evaluation task. We aim to apply RSA and decoding analyses to determine (1) whether there is a brain signature of warmth and competence and (2) whether these brain representations are influenced by the recent past.