Social Inferences and ERP 1 ERP Time Course and Brain Areas of Spontaneous and Intentional Social Inferences

Social Inferences and ERP 2 In our daily interactions with other people, it is beneficial to have some sense of their immediate intentions and long-term personality traits in order to achieve smooth communication and mutual understanding. Detecting underlying personality traits, and especially intentions of others seems even more crucial when we have to make instantaneous decisions about whether they mean us good or bad, so as to approach or avoid them. Our immediate well-being and survival may depend on such critical decisions. For instance, is someone making a move to hit me or to shake my hand? Is a person carrying a gun or a mobile phone? Prior research in the social cognition literature has revealed that we can make such social inferences very spontaneously and almost automatically, including judgments on goals (Hassin, Aarts & Ferguson, 2005) and traits (for a review, see Uleman, Blader & Todorov, 2005). However, this research tells little about the underlying neurological processes by which we make such inferences, the timing at which these processes occur and where in the brain they are computed. What are the neurological processes driving the detection of goals and traits of other people? How fast can we make goal and trait interpretations from behavioral information