What is abstract about seeing social interactions?

Published on April 17, 2024

Social vision is a branch of vision science investigating the visual processing of socially relevant stimuli, primarily people. The focus of this research has recently moved from individuals (faces/bodies and their actions) to groups (two faces/bodies and their interactions). This new focus has revealed that the visual system is particularly sensitive to information that signals social interaction, or the social engagement of an agent. In a recent article in TiCS [1], McMahon and Isik propose that the visual system uses this information to generate abstract representations of social interaction on an ‘exciting middle ground’ that goes beyond the input structure, but precedes cognitive processes, such as theory of mind.

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