Figure 2.

The impact of social-conceptual knowledge on face perception shares a fundamental similarity with more general top-down impacts of conceptual associations in perception. (A) Conceptual knowledge about hairdryers and drills and about garages and bathrooms leads an ambiguous object to be readily disambiguated by the context (Bar, 2004). (B) The “CAT” and “THE” example from Fig. 1, where stored representations of “CAT” and “THE” lead to opposite interpretations of the same letter. (C) Contextual attire cues bias perception of a racially-ambiguous face to be White when surrounded by high-status attire but to be Black when surrounded by low-status attire, due to stereotypic associations between race and social status (Freeman, Penner, et al., 2011). (D) An emotionally ambiguous face is perceived to be angry when male but happy when female, due to stereotypic associations linking men to anger and women to joy (Hess, Adams, & Kleck, 2004). Adapted from Freeman and Johnson (2016).