Abstract: The studies on person construal involving much automatic processing process investigate low level perceptional process of categorization and its mechanism. Based on the physiological principle that the movement of hand can reflect the mental process, mouse-tracking technology measures the mental process in real time by recording and analyzing the coordinates of the locus of the movement of mouse, and it is a new method of measuring mental process in real time. Based on the MouseTracker which is the latest version software of mouse-tracking technology, the studies found that social categories and stereotypes followed the principle of dynamic continuous activation. During the dynamic activation process, the categorization processing based on facial pigmentation took precedence over processing based on the facial shape. The cross-modal processes of social category followed the principles of dynamic integration. Dynamic interactive theory of person construal assumes that the perception of other people is accomplished by a dynamical system involving continuous interaction between social categories, stereotypes, high-level cognitive states, and the low-level processing of facial or vocal cues.

Key words: the process of person construal, social categorization, mouse tracking technology, MouseTracker package, real-time measurement