Social Cognition : le meilleur papier 2007 (ESCON)

Chaque année, l'ESCON, lors du congrès "Transfer Knowledge", récompense le meilleur papier présenté par un jeune chercheur. La récompense est allé cette année à Silvia Tomelleri de l'Université de Padova pour un papier co-écrit avec Luigi Castelli et Tiffany A. Ito portant comme titre Gender and race on the brain: Electrophysiological studies about the automaticity of social categorization and stereotyping.

En voici le résumé :

Tomelleri, S., Castelli, L., & Ito, T. A. Gender and race on the brain: Electrophysiological studies about the automaticity of social categorization and stereotyping.

Abstract

In the social cognition literature the important topic of the automaticity of social categorization has been commonly assessed in an indirect way, namely by measuring stereotype activation. In the present studies, relying on event-related brain potentials (i.e., ERPs), we sought to directly investigate the nature of categorization, to explore the degree at which it occurs automatically as well as how and when categorical information becomes available at different stages of processing. Indeed, we investigated the automatic nature of gender categorization by manipulating the semantic vs. non-semantic processing goals requested by the task (i.e., Study 1 and 2) and the complexity of the task (Study 3). Results highlighted the automatic nature of categorization, independently from the processing goals, at a very early (i.e., N170 waveforms) as well as on a later stage (i.e., P300 waveforms). Furthermore, results of Study 3 suggested that at an early processing stage categorization seemed to be automatically driven by the impenetrable ease in the extraction of category-based knowledge from category cuing stimuli. At a later stage, instead, categorization seemed to be more penetrable by the influence of situational factors, like the complexity of the task. In a fourth study, we made an initial attempt to demonstrate that categorization and stereotype activation are separate processes, hypothesizing that stereotyping is a more conditional process (i.e., goal-dependent) as compared to categorization. As in Study 1 and 2, we found that both in the case of semantic and non-semantic processing goals automatic categorization emerged. Importantly, stereotyping was found only when participants processed stimuli in a semantic way. Therefore, whereas categorization occurred independently of the processing goals, stereotyping appeared to be a conditional process that occurred only when it was functional and useful for the task at hand. Results will be discussed in relation to current models of categorization and stereotyping.



Key words: Social Categorization, Stereotype Activation, Automatic processes, Event-Related Brain Potentials (ERPs), Processing goals