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Poster C157 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Behavioral signatures of social signal detection
Rekha S. Varrier1* (), Zishan Su1*, Qi Liang1, Tory G. Benson1, Eshin Jolly1, Emily S. Finn1; 1Dartmouth College, NH, USA *coauthors
Recent work suggests that social perception begins as early as primary sensory (e.g., visual) processing. However, the underlying shared and individual mechanisms that make visual information social (or not), and/or determine the nature of that information, are not clear. Drawing inspiration from psychophysics, we systematically varied motion parameters in Heider-Simmel-esque animations of geometric shapes and studied how these parameters influence whether and how social interactions are perceived. Our results show that at the group level, simple motion parameters can influence percepts of the presence and nature of social interactions. Additionally, we observed robust individual differences in sensitivity to these parameters that may be associated with social skills and positive affect traits. In sum, our work highlights the potential of (1) simple motion parameters to influence how we perceive complex social interactions, and (2) parametric designs to study idiosyncrasies in visuo-social perception.
Keywords: social perception parametric designs individual differences