The neurocomputational mechanisms of naturalistic trait impression updating
Abstract
Making prudent social decisions in everyday life requires people to form impressions of others’ personalities. First impressions, although impactful, are frequently incomplete or inaccurate. This necessitates mechanisms for updating impressions. This research examines types of information and computational operations the brain uses to update impressions. We collected functional neuroimaging data from participants (N = 28) as they viewed naturalistic audiovisual stimuli of people (N = 28) narrating emotional events in their lives. Pre-trained machine learning models annotated these target people’s facial expressions, voice qualities, and speech semantics. Deep neural networks implemented further computational operations on these annotations, including compression, multimodal fusion, temporal integration, and prediction. Independent participants (N = 602) continuously rated how their impressions of each target person’s traits varied across the course of the videos. Using spatiotemporal representational similarity analysis, we tested whether different perceptual modalities and operations explained patterns of brain activity in scanner participants and mediated spontaneous trait impression updating in the brain. We used intersubject representational similarity analysis to test whether participants’ mood, personality, demographics, or social attitudes explained individual differences in neural signatures of trait impression updating. All perceptual modalities and most computational operations were detected in the brain, but only facial expressions, speech semantics, and compression explained neural activity associated with trait impression updating. Social group attitudes were the only individual difference that mediated neural idiosyncrasies in trait updating. These results indicate that changing one’s mind about someone is a multifarious process, reliant upon multiple modalities of information, computational operations, and prior beliefs.
Related
- Beta bursts carry a graded signal of semantic updating during naturalistic narrative comprehension
- A multiday outdoor festival combining breathwork and cold water immersion is associated with reduced trait anxiety in a naturalistic pre-post study
- A longitudinal naturalistic fMRI study of trait anxiety and cross-phase consistency in subjective fear signature expression
- Mechanisms and measurement of attention in laboratory tasks versus naturalistic learning contexts
- Uncovering patterns and trait-based mechanisms of vegetation recovery over three time periods after low-impact seismic line construction in boreal uplands of northern Alberta
BibTeX
@misc{tepfer2026neurocomputational,
title = {{The neurocomputational mechanisms of naturalistic trait impression updating}},
author = {Lindsey Tepfer and Chujun Lin and Mark Allen Thornton},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/cjwks_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cjwks_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The neurocomputational mechanisms of naturalistic trait impression updating
AU - Lindsey Tepfer
AU - Chujun Lin
AU - Mark Allen Thornton
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/06
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/cjwks_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cjwks_v1/
AB - Making prudent social decisions in everyday life requires people to form impressions of others’ personalities. First impressions, although impactful, are frequently incomplete or inaccurate. This necessitates mechanisms for updating impressions. This research examines types of information and computational operations the brain uses to update impressions. We collected functional neuroimaging data from participants (N = 28) as they viewed naturalistic audiovisual stimuli of people (N = 28) narrating emotional events in their lives. Pre-trained machine learning models annotated these target people’s facial expressions, voice qualities, and speech semantics. Deep neural networks implemented further computational operations on these annotations, including compression, multimodal fusion, temporal integration, and prediction. Independent participants (N = 602) continuously rated how their impressions of each target person’s traits varied across the course of the videos. Using spatiotemporal representational similarity analysis, we tested whether different perceptual modalities and operations explained patterns of brain activity in scanner participants and mediated spontaneous trait impression updating in the brain. We used intersubject representational similarity analysis to test whether participants’ mood, personality, demographics, or social attitudes explained individual differences in neural signatures of trait impression updating. All perceptual modalities and most computational operations were detected in the brain, but only facial expressions, speech semantics, and compression explained neural activity associated with trait impression updating. Social group attitudes were the only individual difference that mediated neural idiosyncrasies in trait updating. These results indicate that changing one’s mind about someone is a multifarious process, reliant upon multiple modalities of information, computational operations, and prior beliefs.
ER -