CCN Forum: The neural basis of social interaction perception

Abstract:
Humans perceive the world in rich social detail. We effortlessly recognize not only objects and faces in our environment, but also other peoples’ social interactions. The ability to perceive others’ social interactions is critical for social trait judgement and ultimately guides how humans act in the social world. We recently identified a region that selectively represents others’ social interactions in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) using controlled experiments with simple stimuli. However, it is unclear how social interactions are processed in the real world where they co-vary with many other sensory and social features. In this talk I will discuss new work using naturalistic video paradigms and novel machine learning analyses to understand how humans process social interactions in natural settings. We find that social interactions guide behavioral judgements and are selectively processed in the brain, even after controlling for the effects of other visual and social information. Finally, I will discuss the computational implications of humans’ social interaction selectivity and how we can develop artificial systems that share this core human ability.