The neuroscience of people watching: how the human brain makes sense of other people's encounters

Abstract

Neuroscientific investigations interested in questions of person perception and impression formation have traditionally asked their participants to observe and evaluate isolated individuals. In recent years, however, there has been a surge of studies presenting third-party encounters between two (or more) individuals as stimuli. Owing to this subtle methodological change, the brain's capacity to understand other people's interactions and relationships from limited visual information--also known as people watching--has become a distinct topic of inquiry. Though initial evidence indicates that this capacity relies on several well-known networks of the social brain (including the person-perception network, the action-observation network, and the mentalizing network), a comprehensive framework of people watching must overcome three major challenges. First, it must develop a taxonomy of judgments that people habitually make when witnessing the encounters of others. Second, it must clarify which visual cues give rise to these encounter-based judgments. Third, it must elucidate how and why several brain networks work together to accomplish these judgments. To advance all three lines of research, we summarize what is currently known as well as what remains to be studied about the neuroscience of people watching.

Perceiving social interactions in the posterior superior temporal sulcus

“…5 and 6; see also ref. 7 for a review of related studies), but have not provided evidence for the selectivity of this response. Two other studies (8,9) found activations in numerous brain regions when people viewed social interactions between two humans vs. two humans engaged in independent activities, both depicted with point-light stimuli.…”

From automata to animate beings: the scope and limits of attributing socialness to artificial agents

“…Of course, these regions do not represent discrete animate and inanimate categories, but instead are responsive to a wide variety of stimuli . Activity within these regions appears to index an observed agent's features (e.g., facial features, body posture, and motion), the interactive nature of the situation, context, and perceived animacy and socialness . The AON comprises frontoparietal regions spanning the posterior inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobule, which are engaged in a similar manner for executed and observed actions .…”

Serotonin 5-HTTLPR Genotype Modulates Reactive Visual Scanning of Social and Non-social Affective Stimuli in Young Children

“…For example, in a behavioral response task it was found that individuals with spider phobia exhibited more rapid visual orienting responses (automatic approach) to spider-related stimuli, but then avoided looking at these negative/affective stimuli compared with a non-anxious control group, reflecting a visual scanning pattern termed vigilance-avoidance (Rinck and Becker, 2007). This novel study also highlights an additional distinction which has emerged in the field, i.e., the recognition that aversive stimuli can be either social (e.g., human actions) or non-social (e.g., aggressive animals such as angry dogs and snakes) in nature (for a review see Van Overwalle, 2009; for a recent review on the topic see also Quadflieg and Koldewyn, 2017). …”