Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research has suggested that perceivers automatically categorize faces based on gender and race but gaps remain regardingwhether effects emerge at encoding or recall and the extent to which they are reducible to perceptual similarities (sincefaces from the same category are generally more similar to each other). We address these limitations using change detectionparadigms adapted from visual working memory literature where one face from an array of faces changes to a face fromthe same or a different gender or racial category. We show that individuals are considerably faster and more accurate toidentify changes that cross a category boundary, even when controlling for a range of perceptual differences and subjectivefeatures of faces. Our results suggest that social category information is automatically encoded in visual working memoryin a format that is not reducible to lower-level perceptual features.