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Medial Prefrontal Dissociations During Processing Of Trait Diagnostic And Nondiagnostic Person Information, Jason P. Mitchell, Jasmin Cloutier, Mahzarin R. Banaji, C Neil Macrae

Dartmouth Scholarship

Previous research has suggested that perceivers spontaneously extract trait-specific information from the behaviour of others. However, little is known about whether perceivers spontaneously engage in the same depth of social-cognitive processing for all person information or reserve such processing specifically for information that conveys diagnostic clues about another person's dispositions. Moreover, a question remains as to whether the processing of such nondiagnostic information can be affected by perceivers’ explicit goal to consider another's dispositions or not. To examine processing of diagnostic and nondiagnostic social information as a function of perceivers’ explicit social-cognitive goals, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) …