My research focuses on three general topics: (1) categorization, (2) face perception and memory, and (3) affective learning.
Categorization:
My main research interest is concerned with how categorization influences the perception, judgment and memory for social (and occasionally non-social) stimuli. Most of this research has been concerned with categorical accentuation effects for simple and multi-faceted stimuli (i.e., the idea that categorization accentuates the perception of differences between categories and of similarities within categories). In this context, my colleagues and I showed that faces are (mis)remembered as more typical of their race and gender category than they actually are. A similar bias also applies to voice memory.
Face perception and memory:
A related research interest concerns how faces that vary in attractiveness, race and emotions are mentally represented, again with implications for perception, judgment and memory. For instance, attractive faces are represented at more average and densely clustered face-space regions, leading to false recognition effects. In this research, I also studied how the social categorization of faces impacts on their holistic processing and on their representation. I also recently proposed to apply the Attractor Fields Model to social cognition phenomena.
Affective learning:
Recently, I have been increasingly interested in how people acquire attitudes. In this research, I provided evidence suggesting that affective learning through evaluative conditioning depends on people’s processing goals, attentional resources and awareness of the CS-US contingencies. Another affective learning process I am currently studying is concerned with mimetic desires (i.e., the idea that people develop implicit preferences toward stimuli that are perceived to be objects of attention in others).