The aim of this review is to highlight the idea of grounding social cognition in sensorimotor interactions shared across agents. We discuss an action-oriented account that emerges from a broader interpretation of the concept of sensorimotor contingencies. We suggest that dynamic informational and sensorimotor coupling across agents can mediate the deployment of action-effect contingencies in social contexts. We propose this concept of socializing sensorimotor contingencies (socSMCs) as a shared framework of analysis for processes within and across brains and bodies, and their physical and social environments. In doing so, we integrate insights from different fields, including neuroscience, psychology, and research on human–robot interaction. We review studies on dynamic embodied interaction and highlight empirical findings that suggest an important role of sensorimotor and informational entrainment in social contexts. Furthermore, we discuss links to closely related concepts, such as enactivism, models of coordination dynamics and others, and clarify differences to approaches that focus on mentalizing and high-level cognitive representations. Moreover, we consider conceptual implications of rethinking cognition as social sensorimotor coupling. The insight that social cognitive phenomena like joint attention, mutual trust or empathy rely heavily on the informational and sensorimotor coupling between agents may provide novel remedies for people with disturbed social cognition and for situations of disturbed social interaction. Furthermore, our proposal has potential applications in the field of human–robot interaction where socSMCs principles might lead to more natural and intuitive interfaces for human users.

Attending to a conversation in a crowded scene requires selection of relevant information, while ignoring other distracting sensory input, such as speech signals from surrounding people. The neural mechanisms of how distracting stimuli influence the processing of attended speech are not well understood. In this high-density electroencephalography (EEG) study, we investigated how different types of speech and non-speech stimuli influence the processing of attended audiovisual speech. Participants were presented with three horizontally aligned speakers who produced syllables. The faces of the three speakers flickered at specific frequencies (19 Hz for flanking speakers and 25 Hz for the center speaker), which induced steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) in the EEG that served as a measure of visual attention. The participants' task was to detect an occasional audiovisual target syllable produced by the center speaker, while ignoring distracting signals originating from the two flanking speakers. In all experimental conditions the center speaker produced a bimodal audiovisual syllable. In three distraction conditions, which were contrasted with a no-distraction control condition, the flanking speakers either produced audiovisual speech, moved their lips, and produced acoustic noise, or moved their lips without producing an auditory signal. We observed behavioral interference in the reaction times (RTs) in particular when the flanking speakers produced naturalistic audiovisual speech. These effects were paralleled by enhanced 19 Hz SSVEP, indicative of a stimulus-driven capture of attention toward the interfering speakers. Our study provides evidence that non-relevant audiovisual speech signals serve as highly salient distractors, which capture attention in a stimulus-driven fashion.

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