We conduct laboratory experiments on sender-receiver games with an incentive for biased transmission (such as security analysts painting a rosy picture about earnings prospects). Our results confirm earlier experimental findings of "overcommunication"-messages are more informative of the true state than they should be, in equilibrium theory. Furthermore, we used eyetracking to show that senders look much less at receiver payoffs compared to their own payoffs. At the same time, the senders' pupils dilate when they send deceptive messages, and dilate more when the deception is larger in magnitude. Together, these data are consistent with the hypothesis that figuring out how much to deceive another player is cognitively difficult.Using a combination of sender messages, lookup patterns, and pupil dilation, we can predict the true state about twice as often as predicted by equilibrium.Using these measures would enable receiver subjects to earn 6-8 percent more than they actually do.

Another person's caress is one of the most powerful of all emotional social signals. How much the primary somatosensory cortices (SIs) participate in processing the pleasantness of such social touch remains unclear. Although ample empirical evidence supports the role of the insula in affective processing of touch, here we argue that SI might be more involved in affective processing than previously thought by showing that the response in SI to a sensual caress is modified by the perceived sex of the caresser. In a functional MRI study, we manipulated the perceived affective quality of a caress independently of the sensory properties at the skin: heterosexual males believed they were sensually caressed by either a man or woman, although the caress was in fact invariantly delivered by a female blind to condition type. Independent analyses showed that SI encoded, and was modulated by, the visual sex of the caress, and that this effect is unlikely to originate from the insula. This suggests that current models may underestimate the role played by SI in the affective processing of social touch.affective touch | sexual selection | gender | crossmodal perception | hot cognition

People with autism are impaired in their social behavior, including their eye contact with others, but the processes that underlie this impairment remain elusive. We combined high-resolution eye tracking with computational modeling in a group of 10 high-functioning individuals with autism to address this issue. The group fixated the location of the mouth in facial expressions more than did matched controls, even when the mouth was not shown, even in faces that were inverted and most noticeably at latencies of 200-400 ms. Comparisons with a computational model of visual saliency argue that the abnormal bias for fixating the mouth in autism is not driven by an exaggerated sensitivity to the bottom-up saliency of the features, but rather by an abnormal top-down strategy for allocating visual attention.

Altered visual exploration of faces likely contributes to social cognition deficits seen in autism. To investigate the relationship between face gaze and social cognition in autism, we measured both face gaze and how facial regions were actually used during emotion judgments from faces. Compared to IQ-matched healthy controls, nine high-functioning adults with autism failed to make use of information from the eye region of faces, instead relying primarily on information from the mouth. Face gaze accounted for the increased reliance on the mouth, and partially accounted for the deficit in using information from the eyes. These findings provide a novel quantitative assessment of how people with autism utilize information in faces when making social judgments.

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The role of the human amygdala in real social interactions remains essentially unknown, although studies in nonhuman primates and studies using photographs and video in humans have shown it to be critical for emotional processing and suggest its importance for social cognition. We show here that complete amygdala lesions result in a severe reduction in direct eye contact during conversations with real people, together with an abnormal increase in gaze to the mouth. These novel findings from real social interactions are consistent with an hypothesized role for the amygdala in autism and the approach taken here opens up new directions for quantifying social behavior in humans.

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Summary In his original description of autism, Kanner [1] noted that the parents of autistic children often exhibited unusual social behavior themselves, consistent with what we now know about the high heritability of autism [2]. We investigated this so-called “Broad Autism Phenotype” in the parents of children with autism, who themselves did not have a diagnosis of any psychiatric illness. Building on recent quantifications of social cognition in autism [3], we investigated face processing using the “Bubbles” method [4] to measure how viewers make use of information from specific facial features in order to judge emotions. Parents of autistic children who were assessed as socially aloof (N=15), a key component of the phenotype [5], showed a remarkable reduction in processing the eye region in faces, together with enhanced processing of the mouth, compared to a control group of parents of neurotypical children (N=20), as well as to non-aloof parents of autistic children (N=27, whose pattern of face processing was intermediate). The pattern of face processing seen in the Broad Autism Phenotype showed striking similarities to that previously reported to occur in autism [3], and for the first time provides a window into the endophenotype that may result from a subset of the genes that contribute to social cognition.