In day-to-day social interactions, we experience other individuals as coherent wholes rather than distributed sets of person-features. It is therefore important to understand how diverse forms of social information, spanning several distinct modalities and brain systems, are combined during person perception. To date, research in social cognitive neuroscience has predominantly focussed on the operations of distinct subsystems of social information processing, such as body and face perception (associated with category-selective brain circuits in the ventral visual stream) and person-inference (associated with theory of mind). The mechanisms and consequences of integration between such systems are less studied. The first empirical chapter of this thesis (Chapter 2) we investigated the effects of trait inference on body perception, by manipulating trait knowledge and measuring the effects on judgements of health and body size. In the second empirical chapter (Chapter 3), we sought to assess the automaticity of links between body shapes and trait concepts, by asking
participants to perform a response competition task involving bodies and trait words in the context of a secondary working memory task designed to manipulate cognitive load. In the third and final empirical chapter (Chapter 4), we tested whether manipulating trait information would bias visual representations of body shape through cross-modal perceptual adaptation of body perception mechanisms. Overall, the findings reinforce the need to consider integration between diverse forms of social information in models of person perception and social cognition more broadly and provide a functional signature of links between one type of person knowledge (personality trait inferences) and one dimension of social perception (body-size perception).