This study investigates social context's effect on human perceptual decision-making in animacy recognition, a crucial skill for identifying potential social interaction partners. Visual cues, particularly goal-directed and synchronized motion, are essential in animacy inference. We hypothesize a bias (evidenced by response frequency, response time, and confidence levels) toward perceiving motion as animate when in the presence of others. Participants assess animations featuring two moving disks engaging in interactions characterized by varying degrees of synchronized and goal-directed motion. These assessments are conducted individually and alongside another participant performing the same task. During each animation, participants indicate via button press whether they perceive the disks as being alive. Subsequently, they rate their confidence in their response using a 1-5 Likert Scale. By employing Bayesian and Drift Diffusion Models, we aim to uncover how the presence of others impacts animacy perception, thereby shedding light on the role of social factors in perceptual decision-making.

A growing body of research indicates that moral decision-making is influenced by language status. Across studies and language combinations, participants make more utilitarian judgements when responding to moral dilemmas in a foreign (L2), compared to a native (L1) language. One explanation for the Foreign Language Effect is a reduced access to social norms in L2, since normative knowledge is acquired early in life in the native language. To test this account, we provided Chinese-English late bilinguals with “temporary social norms”: Upon dilemma presentation, response percentages of alleged previous participants were shown, representing either a deontological or utilitarian majority. We found that in English, participants conformed to utilitarian and deontological majority information, highlighting the malleability of moral decisions in an L2 context. In Chinese, participants only conformed to the utilitarian majority, potentially reflecting the influence of collectivist values. Our findings highlight the complex interplay between language, culture, and social norms in moral cognition.

Young infants can discriminate a wide range of stimuli. Over the first year of life, this ability becomes restricted to frequently experienced stimuli through the process of perceptual narrowing. In face perception, this is reflected in the emergence of the Other-race-effect (ORE) at 9 months, a difficulty to recognise faces from unfamiliar racial groups. This can be avoided through other-race face exposure. Interestingly, wider language exposure has been suggested to have a similar – cross-domain – effect, as narrowing in bilinguals’ speech perception is postponed and protracted. We tested 9-month-old monolingual and bilingual infants from London on a face recognition task with own- and other-race faces. Detailed information on infants’ everyday language and face exposure were gathered. Neither group showed the classic ORE, indicating that growing up in a multi-ethnic city attenuates it. Importantly, bilinguals exhibited higher recognition scores than monolinguals, suggesting a general face recognition advantage in this population.