ViewpointTwos in human visual perception
Section snippets
Sociality shapes perception
A decade ago, vision scientist, Ken Nakayama, announced that vision science was going social (Nakayama, 2011). The social function of vision appears clear from the highly specialized mechanisms for face and body perception. Embracing the idea that vision has been massively shaped by the requirements of social life, Nakayama anticipated the discovery of perceptual adaptations for other aspects of the social world.
Faces and bodies are the physical actors of social life; but social life is only
Visual tuning for facing dyads
A face is attended to, detected and discriminated in terms of identity much better than an inverted face (e.g., Bruyer, 2011; Jiang, Costello, & He, 2007; Purcell & Stewart, 1988; Rezlescu, Susilo, Wilmer, & Caramazza, 2017). The cost of inversion, or face inversion effect (FIE), is higher for faces than for other familiar objects. The FIE denotes neural tuning to the face configuration, which makes perception particularly efficient, though particularly susceptible to spatial perturbation.
Attentional advantage of facing dyads
The interpretation of the inversion effect as an index of visual tuning to face and body configurations meshes well with the ability of those stimuli to recruit attention more strongly than other objects, as documented with, among others, visual search and change detection tasks (Cohen, Alvarez, Nakayama, & Konkle, 2017; Downing, Bray, Rogers, & Childs, 2004; Hershler & Hochstein, 2005; New, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2007). Recently, an attentional advantage has been reported for facing body dyads,
Neural tuning and representational sharpening
Compared with their scrambled version or other familiar objects, faces and bodies increase activity in specific areas of the visual cortex. A recent functional magnetic resonance imaging study shows that face- and body-selective cortices also respond to facing bodies more strongly than to identical but not facing bodies (Abassi & Papeo, 2020, Fig. 1). The same brain areas do not distinguish between interacting and noninteracting people based on contextual cues (e.g., accessories or clothing) or
Grouping of bodies: effects of access versus encoding
Faster/better stimulus detection and recognition of stimuli encompassing multiple parts (or objects) has often been linked to perceptual grouping, that is the representation of parts as a structure unit, or a group. Perceptual grouping is invoked across different levels of vision and types of stimuli: It applies to dots and lines in gestalt perception, as well as to facial features in a face, and parts in a body –although the relationship between gestalt-like grouping and configural processing,
Multiple-body versus multiple-object perception
Markers of face specificity, such as attentional advantage, inversion effect, and increased activity in visual areas specifically linked to configural processing, suggest analogous visual specificity for facing dyads. But, are multiple bodies (or dyads, at least) special relative to other multiple-object sets?
Object pairs in regular, meaningful configurations (e.g., a lamp above a table) are recognized particularly efficiently, suggesting that they too might be processed as a grouped unit (
Conclusions
Research on multiple-body perception suggests that spatial relations among objects matter in visual perception, so much that a body is represented in profoundly different ways depending on whether or not it faces toward another, and is reciprocated. If it does, a new attentional/perceptual unit is formed, larger and more complex than a single object.
This research defines a new class of stimuli that, I propose, can be better described and understood by analogy with faces. Like faces, facing
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Jean-Rémy Hochmann and Alfonso Caramazza for valuable discussion on an early version of this article. This work was supported by the European Research Council (Horizon2020, Project THEMPO, Starting Grant 758473).
References (49)
- et al.
The distributed representation of random and meaningful object pairs in human occipitotemporal cortex: The weighted average as a general rule
Neuroimage
(2013) - et al.
Bodies capture attention when nothing is expected
Cognition
(2004) - et al.
Encoding of event roles from visual scenes is rapid, spontaneous, and interacts with higher-level visual processing
Cognition
(2018) - et al.
At first sight: A high-level pop out effect for faces
Vision Research
(2005) - et al.
Object vision in a structured world
Trends Cogn Sci
(2019) - et al.
The many faces of configural processing
Trends Cogn Sci
(2002) - et al.
The neural basis of perceiving person interactions
Cortex; a Journal Devoted To the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior
(2015) - et al.
Action relationships concatenate representations of separate objects in the ventral visual system
Neuroimage
(2010) - et al.
Privileged detection of conspecifics: Evidence from inversion effects during continuous flash suppression
Cognition
(2012) - et al.
Why are social interactions found quickly in visual search tasks?
Cognition
(2020)
Neural responses to visually observed social interactions
Neuropsychologia
Lateral occipitotemporal cortex encodes perceptual components of social actions rather than abstract representations of sociality
Neuroimage
The representation of two-body shapes in the human visual cortex
The Journal of Neuroscience: the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience
How to build a baby that can read minds: Cognitive mechanisms in mindreading
The maladapted mind: Classic readings in evolutionary psychopathology
Human social attention
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Interaction between scene and object processing revealed by human fMRI and MEG decoding
The Journal of Neuroscience: the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience
Configural face processing: A meta-analytic survey
Perception
Becoming a face expert
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B Biological Scienceshilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
Concept innateness, concept continuity, and bootstrapping
The Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Visual search for object categories is predicted by the representational architecture of high-level visual cortex
Journal of Neurophysiology
Featural and configurational processes in the recognition of faces of different familiarity
Perception
Two equals one: two human actions during social interaction are grouped as one unit in working memory
Psychological Science
Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the evidence for “top-down” effects
The Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Getting the gist of events: Recognition of two-participant actions from brief displays
Journal of Experimental Psychology. General
Cited by (44)
Moral thin-slicing: Forming moral impressions from a brief glance
2024, Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyInnate sensitivity to face-to-face biological motion
2024, iScienceNot socially blind: Unimpaired perception of social interaction in schizophrenia
2024, Schizophrenia ResearchHierarchical organization of social action features along the lateral visual pathway
2023, Current BiologySeeing social interactions
2023, Trends in Cognitive Sciences