Dear all,

You are invited to attend McGill's Cognitive Area Seminar this *Friday April 8th, 3:30 - 5 PM *(*location *= 1205 Docteur Penfield Ave., Room S3/4).

*Our speaker is Professor Lauren Human* (McGill Psychology), who will talk about *"**Who Forms Accurate Personality Impressions? Examining the Role of Social Attention**"*. See below dashed line for a full abstract.

This will be our final talk of the semester. Hope to see you there!

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*Who Forms Accurate Personality Impressions? Examining the Role of Social Attention* Professor Lauren Human, Department of Psychology, McGill University

Being able to form accurate impressions of others’ personality traits, or be a “good judge”, is argued to be an important and adaptive social skill. Yet despite decades of research on the topic, the good judge has been very difficult to identify, raising questions about whether such a person exists. In this talk, I will argue that the good judge may indeed exist and that the key to identifying this person may lie in adequately assessing individual differences in social attention. First I will present evidence demonstrating that contextual factors that enhance social attention in turn increase accuracy. Then I will present new data indicating that stable biological correlates of social attention and vigilance, including cardiac vagal flexibility and pro-inflammatory profiles, predict forming more accurate impressions of others. Discussion will focus on the implications and next steps of this line of research.