Abstract
The most basic social relation is realized when two social agents engage in a physical exchange, or interaction. How do representations of social interactions come about, from basic processing in visual perception? Behavioral and neuroimaging phenomena show that human vision (and selective areas of the visual cortex) discriminates between scenes involving the same bodies, based on whether the individuals appear to interact or not. What information in a multiple-body scene channels the representation of social interaction? And what exactly is represented of a social relation in the visual system? I will present behavioral results, based on a switch cost paradigm, showing that the visual system exploits mere spatial information (i.e., relative position of bodies in space and posture features) to "decide" not only whether there is an interaction or not, but also who the agent and the patient are. Another set of results, based on a backward masking paradigm, shows that the visual processing of socially-relevant spatial relations is agnostic to the content of the interaction, and indeed segregated from, and prior to, (inter)action identification. Thus, drawing a divide between perception and cognition, the current results suggest that the visual representation of social relations corresponds to a configuration of parts (bodies/agents) that respect the spatial relations of a prototypical social interaction –a sort of social-template, theoretically analogous to the face- or body-template in the visual system– before inference. How specific/general to different instances of social interaction this template is will be the main focus of my discussion.