What is social about social perception research?

Abstract

A growing consensus in social cognitive neuroscience holds that large portions of the primate visual brain are dedicated to the processing of social information, i.e., to those aspects of stimuli that are usually encountered in social interactions such as others' facial expressions, actions, and symbols. Yet, studies of social perception have mostly employed simple pictorial representations of conspecifics. These stimuli are social only in the restricted sense that they physically resemble objects with which the observer would typically interact. In an equally important sense, however, these stimuli might be regarded as “non-social”: the observer knows that they are viewing pictures and might therefore not attribute current mental states to the stimuli or might do so in a qualitatively different way than in a real social interaction. Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of such higher-order conceptualization of the stimulus for social perceptual processing. Here, we assess the similarity between the various types of stimuli used in the laboratory and object classes encountered in real social interactions. We distinguish two different levels at which experimental stimuli can match social stimuli as encountered in everyday social settings: (1) the extent to which a stimulus' physical properties resemble those typically encountered in social interactions and (2) the higher-level conceptualization of the stimulus as indicating another person's mental states. We illustrate the significance of this distinction for social perception research and report new empirical evidence further highlighting the importance of mental state attribution for perceptual processing. Finally, we discuss the potential of this approach to inform studies of clinical conditions such as autism.

High autistic trait individuals do not modulate gaze behaviour in response to social presence but look away more when actively engaged in an interaction

“…In this group, beliefs regarding social presence do not appear to affect gaze behaviour. One way of conceptualising the difference between the “recorded” and the “live” stimulus is that they are associated with different mental state inferences [Teufel et al, ]. In order for changes in gaze behaviour to occur, mental state inferences are made regarding the experimenter: for example, “she can see me” for the “live” stimulus, and these modulate behaviour in a top‐down manner.…”

“…However, they are necessarily limited in the extent to which the findings generalise to naturalistic settings. In recent years, there has been growing awareness of the need for a more ecologically valid approach to the study of social perception [Kingstone, ; Teufel et al, ]. In particular, the interactive aspects of social settings have been highlighted as a crucial but much neglected variable in social neuroscience [Schilbach et al, ].…”

I know you can see me: Social attention influences bodily self-awareness

“…We thus created two conditions contrasted in terms of the associated belief to be watched by the other person or not, while maintaining identical low level visual properties of the stimuli. As mentioned above, previous studies have shown that the belief to be in live connection with another individual influences markedly the neural response to and the behavioural attention orienting effect of averted gaze (Teufel et al, 2013;Wiese et al, 2012). For this reason, we introduced a post-experiment debriefing interview, which allowed us to check if the participant had actually believed to be in online connection with another individual and to split the participants in two groups as a function of their belief in the deception procedure.…”

Seeing Seeing

“…prolonged exposure to leftward gaze causes subjects to see subsequent gazes as shifted to the right). In contrast, they found that if the subject believes that the agent cannot see, adaptation to gaze direction either does not occur (Teufel et al, 2009) or is significantly attenuated (Teufel et al, 2013). 7 Other studies exhibiting similar effects include Nuku and Bekkering (2008) These findings strongly suggest that one's belief regarding whether another agent can see modulates the degree to which one attends to that agent's gaze.…”

“…First, as explained above, there is converging evidence for a system dedicated to the perception of gaze direction. Moreover, the gaze-cueing effect appears to be modulated by adaptation to gaze direction (Bayliss et al, 2011;Teufel et al, 2009Teufel et al, , 2013. Second, not all asymmetries in low-level features trigger automatic shifts of attention.…”