Social Attribution Behavior in Newly Sighted Children.

Abstract

Introduction: Vision plays a crucial role in social cognition. Humans anthropomorphize and attribute causality even to minimal stimuli. This was demonstrated compellingly by Heider and Simmel (1944) using a simple animation comprising dynamic geometric primitives devoid of any social cues such as speech, body pose and facial expressions. Neurodevelopmental studies have utilized the animation to study social attribution, particularly in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), whereby individuals with good verbal IQ fail to derive social contexts and to attribute personality traits to shape movements. In the present study, we test the Heider and Simmel animation on an unusual group of children, those who were born blind and received sight surgeries late in childhood. Methods: We presented a couple runs of the Heider and Simmel animation to patient groups treated for congenital blindness and to age-matched controls (n=6). One of the patient groups consisted of newly sighted children (n=5) and the other of children operated over two years ago (n=8). Participants later provided descriptive responses to a few narrative questions. We also presented selected excerpts from the animation and recorded their responses. Results: Our data revealed striking differences in subjective responses between the patients and control groups. While most patients were able to recognize different shapes and simple movements (Such as, running around), they could not draw out social narratives, attribute personality traits to individual shapes or assign social meaning to movements. Controls on the other hand described goal-directed inter-shape interactions, sequence of movements and were able to anthropomorphize dynamic scenes. Discussion: Our findings reveal no innate ability for social attribution in perception of simple dynamic sequences, indicating that early visual deprivation compromises the development of mentalizing and attribution capabilities in the patient group. This suggests that there may be a critical period for learning to assign social meaning to dynamic forms.