Abstract
While much existing work in social perception has focused on how we detect and recognize people and their individual social cues, most encounters in life involve more than one person. Indeed, recent work has demonstrated that visual perception is sensitive to social interactions, with facing dyads located more efficiently than non-facing ones, and individuals within facing dyads found less efficiently than individuals in non-facing ones. This suggests that interacting dyads are processed as visual perceptual units. Here we assessed if perception may be similarly specialized for larger interacting groups, such as triads or groups of three. To test this, we used a visual search task in which participants located either a facing triad (among non-facing triads) or a non-facing triad (among facing triads). The triads were either comprised of all individuals depicted in neutral poses (uniform triads) or of two individuals depicted in neutral poses and one individual depicted performing a pointing gesture (non-uniform triads). Participants were faster to find facing triads, but only when they were uniform. This search advantage for uniform facing triads suggests that, similar to dyads, our perceptual system is well-tuned to perceive larger interacting groups as well. Thus, human visual perception appears to be sensitive to sophisticated information about the relationship between multiple interacting people.