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Theoretical understanding of first impressions from faces has been closely associated with the proposal that rapid approach–avoidance decisions are needed during social interactions. Nevertheless, experimental work has rarely examined first impressions of people who are actually moving—instead extrapolating from photographic images. In six experiments, we describe the relationship between social attributions (dominance and trustworthiness) and the motion and apparent intent of a perceived person. We first show strong correspondence between judgments of photos and avatars of the same people (Experiment 1). Avatars were rated as more dominant and trustworthy when walking toward the viewer than when stationary (Experiment 2). Furthermore, avatars approaching the viewer were rated as more dominant than those avoiding (walking past) the viewer, or remaining stationary (Experiment 3). Trustworthiness was increased by movement, but not affected by approaching/avoiding paths. Surprisingly, dominance ratings increased both when avatars were approaching and being approached (Experiments 4–6), independently of agency. However, diverging movement (moving backward) reduced dominance ratings—again independently of agency (Experiment 6). These results demonstrate the close link between dominance judgments and approach and show the updatable nature of first impressions—their formation depended on the immediate dynamic context in a more subtle manner than previously suggested. Public Significance Statement: Prior research demonstrates that we form first impressions from brief exposures to faces and that these impressions can influence our subsequent behavior in meaningful ways. However, the preponderance of evidence on this topic comes from studies using static photographs. Here we use animated avatars to investigate the effects of movement on first impressions. We find that movement alone increases impressions of trustworthiness while specifically approach-related movement increases impressions of dominance. Together these data demonstrate that theories of first impressions should accommodate for their dynamic and flexible nature, even within the first seconds of exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the mechanisms underlying sandwich priming, a procedure in which a brief preprime target presentation precedes the conventional mask-prime-target sequence, used to study orthographic similarity. Lupker and Davis (2009) showed the sandwich paradigm enhances orthographic priming effects: With primes moderately related to targets, sandwich priming produced significant facilitation, but conventional priming did not. They argued that unlike conventional priming, sandwich priming is not susceptible to an uncontrolled counteractive inhibitory process, lexical competition, that cancels out moderate facilitation effects. They suggest lexical competition is eliminated by preactivating the target's representation, privileging the target over similar lexical units (competitors). As such, it better measures orthographic relatedness between primes and targets, a key purpose of many priming studies. We tested whether elimination of lexical competition could indeed account for the observed orthographic priming boost with sandwich priming. In three lexical decision experiments and accompanying simulations with a competitive network model, we compared priming effects in three preprime procedures: no preprime (conventional), identity (target) preprime (sandwich), and competitor preprime (included to exacerbate lexical competition). The related prime conditions consisted of replaced-letters, shared neighbor (one-letter-different from both competitor preprime and target), and transposed-all-letter nonword primes. Contrary to the model's predictions, the competitor preprime did not attenuate (Experiment 1) or even reverse the priming effect (Experiment 2). Moreover, the competitor enabled facilitatory priming that was absent with no preprime (Experiment 3). These data suggested that the sandwich orthographic boost could not be attributed to reduced lexical competition but rather to prelexical processes in word recognition.