Abstract
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.
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Data and experimental material are available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr. Chuanpeng Hu for his helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.
Funding
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31900757, 32020103008, 31920103009), Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (2021A1515010746), the Major Project of National Social Science Foundation (20&ZD153, 19ZDA363), Shenzhen-Hong Kong Institute of Brain Science – Shenzhen Fundamental Research Institutions (2019SHIBS0003) and Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangdong Province of China (2019A050510048).
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Lin, W., Zhang, Z., Zhou, X. et al. Overlap between mental representations of nationalities modulates perceptual matching. Curr Psychol 42, 18419–18430 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02962-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02962-x