Survival prompts organisms to prepare adaptive behavior in response to environmental and social threat. However, what are the specific features of the appearance of a conspecific that trigger such adaptive behaviors? For social species, the prime candidates for triggering defense systems are the visual features of the face and the body. We propose a novel approach for studying the ability of the brain to gather survival-relevant information from seeing conspecific body features. Specifically, we propose that behaviorally relevant information from bodies and body expressions is coded at the levels of midlevel features in the brain. These levels are relatively independent from higher-order cognitive and conscious perception of bodies and emotions. Instead, our approach is embedded in an ethological framework and mobilizes computational models for feature discovery.

生存促使生物体准备适应性行为以应对环境和社会威胁。然而，触发这种适应行为的同种外观的具体特征是什么？对于社会物种，触发防御系统的主要候选者是面部和身体的视觉特征。我们提出了一种新方法来研究大脑从观察同种身体特征中收集生存相关信息的能力。具体来说，我们建议将来自身体和身体表情的行为相关信息编码在大脑中层特征的水平上。这些水平相对独立于对身体和情绪的高阶认知和意识感知。反而，