計算モデリングと実験心理学的アプローチによる顔印象知覚メカニズムの探求

抄録

Judgments of facial impressions such as attractiveness, trustworthiness, and dominance affect wide-ranging social outcomes. Research on perceptual mechanisms in forming such impressions is therefore central to the understanding of social cognition. This article provides a brief overview of two disparate approaches to understand how people form impressions from faces: computational modeling and experimental psychological approaches. The computational modeling approach allows for identifying the links between facial features and impressions in a data-driven manner, and thus for manipulating a face along an arbitrary impression dimension. The experimental psychological approach contributes to an understanding of how we perceive facial impressions in our cognitive systems by adopting perceptual and cognitive psychological experimental paradigms. In future studies, increased theoretical and methodological cross-talk between the computational modeling and the experimental approach would benefit progress in both fields.