Meaningful interactions can enhance visual discrimination of human agents

Abstract

The ability to interpret and predict other people's actions is highly evolved in humans and is believed to play a central role in their cognitive behavior. However, there is no direct evidence that this ability confers a tangible benefit to sensory processing. Our quantitative behavioral experiments show that visual discrimination of a human agent is influenced by the presence of a second agent. This effect depended on whether the two agents interacted (by fighting or dancing) in a meaningful synchronized fashion that allowed the actions of one agent to serve as predictors for the expected actions of the other agent, even though synchronization was irrelevant to the visual discrimination task. Our results demonstrate that action understanding has a pervasive impact on the human ability to extract visual information from the actions of other humans, providing quantitative evidence of its significance for sensory performance.

Perceiving social interactions in the posterior superior temporal sulcus

“…First, social interactions reveal information about individuals; we determine whether a person is nice or not nice by how that person treats others. Social interactions also improve the recognition of individual agents and their actions (43). In addition, social interactions reveal the structure of our social world: who is a friend (or foe) of whom, who belongs to which social group, and who has power over whom.…”

The neural basis of perceiving person interactions

“…As a result, theories on how observers encode and integrate visual information involving several people are poorly developed. The lack of scientific inquiry regarding the topic seems surprising given that initial studies suggest that humans are highly skilled at making sense of scenes involving multiple individuals (Costanzo & Archer, 1989;Neri et al, 2006;Sinke et al, 2010;Proverbio et al, 2011). Recent fMRI studies additionally suggest that witnessing meaningful social interactions recruits brain regions dedicated towards person perception and social-cognitive reasoning (Centelles et al, 2011;Kujala et al, 2011).…”

“…Therefore, our results suggest that the extraction of motion cues as pivotal signals of agents' intentions and goals gains in relevance when perceivers process ambiguous social scenes (cf. Hirai & Kakigi, 2009, Neri et al, 2006.…”

“…If the same mechanism holds true in the realm of person perception, the grouping of several people into one scene may also impact perceptual encoding of human faces and bodies (Hirai & Kakigi, 2009;Neri, Luu, & Levi, 2006). Such encoding is thought to occur in the so-called core neural network of person perception (Gobbini & Haxby, 2007;Rossion, Hanseeuw, & Dricot, 2012;Weiner & Grill-Spector, 2010), a system that comprises several brain regions, including the occipital face area (OFA), fusiform face area (FFA), posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), extrastriate body area (EBA) and fusiform body area (FBA).…”

Self–other relations in social development and autism: multiple roles for mirror neurons and other brain bases

“…The pSTS (see a more detailed discussion below) provides the visual input to the mirror neuron system [Arbib, 2005;Iacoboni & Dapretto, 2006;Iacoboni et al, 2001;Keysers & Perrett, 2004]. Furthermore, the pSTS is important for controlling attention to visual stimuli and may be sensitive to input from motor areas, which affects sensitivity to action perception [Astafiev, Stanley, Shulman, & Corbetta, 2004;Neri, Luu, & Levi, 2006]. Therefore, deficits in this area may reflect dysfunction of the mirror neuron system as a whole.…”