The Cognitive Capitalist: Social Benefits of Perceptual Economy

Abstract This chapter explores the perceptual processes that support the extraction of social information from faces and how these fit within extant models of social cognition. It assesses the efficiency with which our perceptual system extracts visual information from faces to provide us with useful social cues. To this end, the chapter considers the minimal perceptual requirements associated with categorization and individuation early in the person-construal process, rather than in the content of stereotypes and prejudices that occur further down the processing stream.