Maggie Shiffrar Rutgers University at Newark 0730985
How do people visually perceive the threats posed to them by other humans? The PIs address this question, and do so through a collaboration between vision research and social psychology. Their project focuses on three broad questions that are central to the advancement of threat detection: Is a person present? What is the person''s intent (hostile or non-hostile)? And how do the emotions and psychosocial resources of observers affect their ability to detect the presence and intentions of other people? These questions are investigated in laboratory experiments that combine point-light motion paradigms, emotional-arousal and psychosocial resource manipulations, psychophysiological monitoring techniques, and mathematical modeling. A principal goal of this research is to approximate the real world conditions in which human threats arise, and the psychological states in which people perceive these threats to promote the accurate and rapid detection of threatening persons and hostile intentions.
The research will contribute to public safety, by identifying the visual conditions and the psycho-social states that can enhance or impede security personnel in their efforts to locate threatening actors and to discriminate threatening actors from innocent civilians. The research will also advance basic theory, by investigating functional connections between ""lower level"" visual processes and ""higher level"" interpersonal and intra-personal processes.
