Changing our minds: the neural bases of dynamic impression updating

While a great deal of initial work in social neuroscience addressed the functional bases of our first impressions, our social evaluations of other people are anything but static. Just as our impressions can change, so too has our understanding of the neural underpinnings supporting this dynamic form of social learning. First, I review initial neuroimaging work on behavior-based impression updating, which observed that a distributed network of regions works in concert to revise trait representations in light of new behavioral information. Next, I discuss more recent research detailing how the updating process may be influenced by both bottom-up (e.g. experience) and top-down factors (e.g. motivation). Finally, I explore the contributions of more computational work studying similar processes via tasks that model social learning through repeated interactions and feedback-based reinforcement. Taken together, this work illustrates the expansion of our understanding of social impression formation, beyond static initial snapshots and towards a more dynamic process in which our representations of other people are continuously revised and reinterpreted in light of new information.