Overlap between mental representations of nationalities modulates perceptual matching

There is abundant evidence on the human ability to encode complex social networks and on the behavioral consequences of tracking social network structure. However, it remains largely understudied whether mental representations of direct (i.e., the connections between self and others) and indirect (i.e., the connections between third parties) social relations impact lower-level perceptual processing. Across three experiments, the current study addressed this issue by examining the role of both self-related (Experiment 1, n = 96) and allocentric (Experiment 2, n = 87; Experiment 3, n = 85) connections in low-level perception with a perceptual matching task. Our results revealed that the perceptual discrimination of stimuli associated with different nationalities corresponds to the closeness between two nationalities. Specifically, it was more difficult for participants to perceptually discriminate nationalities with closer relations. Notably, the effects of social ties are independent of whether the closeness in relations is self-related or allocentric. Together, our findings suggest that the encoding of nationality relations modulates human perceptual processing in a generic manner.
Author(s): Wanghuan Lin [sup.1] [sup.2] [sup.3] [sup.4] , Zhixin Zhang [sup.1] [sup.2] [sup.3] [sup.4] , Xingmei Zhou [sup.5] , Yue-Jia Luo [sup.5] [sup.6] [sup.7] , Chunliang Feng [sup.1] [sup.2] [sup.3] [...]