Bound together: Social binding leads to faster processing, spatial distortion, and enhanced memory of interacting partners.

Abstract

The binding of features into perceptual wholes is a well-established phenomenon, which has previously only been studied in the context of early vision and low-level features, such as colour or proximity. We hypothesised that a similar binding process, based on higher level information, could bind people into interacting groups, facilitating faster processing and enhanced memory of social situations. To investigate this possibility we used three experimental approaches to explore grouping effects in displays involving interacting people. First, using a visual search task we demonstrate more rapid processing for interacting (versus non-interacting) pairs in an odd-quadrant paradigm (Experiments 1a & 1b). Second, using a spatial judgment task, we show that interacting individuals are remembered as physically closer than are non-interacting individuals (Experiments 2a & 2b). Finally, we show that memory retention of grouprelevant and irrelevant features is enhanced when recalling interacting partners in a surprise memory task (Experiments 3a & 3b). Each of these results is consistent with the social binding hypothesis, and alternative explanations based on low level perceptual features and attentional effects are ruled out. We conclude that automatic mid-level grouping processes bind individuals into groups on the basis of their perceived interaction. Such social binding could provide the basis for more sophisticated social processing. Identifying the automatic encoding of social interactions in visual search, distortions of spatial working memory, and facilitated retrieval of object properties from longer-term memory, opens new approaches to studying social cognition with possible practical applications.

Visual Search for People Among People

“…While we do not know which specific feature of facing dyads accounts for the asymmetry, our results encourage the thinking that facing dyads fall in the same biologically-relevant category as faces or bodies, associated with high visual sensitivity, rapid discrimination and spontaneous recruitment of attention (Birmingham et al, 2008;Downing et al, 2004;Gobbini, Gors, Halchenko, Hughes, & Cipolli;New et al, 2007;Langton, Law, Burton, & Schweinberger, 2008). In line with this view, interacting bodies are recognized faster and better than unrelated bodies in low-visibility conditions (Papeo, Stein, & Soto-Faraco, 2017; see also Vestner, Tipper, Hartley, Over, & Rueschemeyer, 2019). Moreover, just like for faces and bodies, perception of interacting dyads has been associated with a behavioral signature of high visual sensitivity (i.e., large cost of inversion; Papeo & Abassi, 2019), and with neural selectivity in posterior temporal regions (Isik, Koldewyn, Beeler, & Kanwisher, 2017;Walbrin, Downing, & Koldewyn, 2018).…”

The Representation of Two-Body Shapes in the Human Visual Cortex

“…Behavioral research suggests that key properties of social interaction, such as action coherence and agent/patient-role information, correlate with visuo-spatial features that are accessed quickly in visual events (Hafri et al, 2013(Hafri et al, , 2018Glanemann et al, 2016). Moreover, multiple bodies in configurations that imply interaction (e.g., face-to-face), are detected, recognized, and remembered better than unrelated bodies (Ding et al, 2017;Papeo and Abassi, 2019;Vestner et al, 2019).…”

Moving toward versus away from another: how body motion direction changes the representation of bodies and actions in the visual cortex

“…This methodological choice allowed testing the specific hypothesis behind the study, according to which visual perception areas encode for visuo-spatial cues associated with social interaction (i.e., spatial proximity, body orientation and approaching behaviour), rather than the social interaction itself. Based on the above results (Papeo et al 2017a;Papeo and Abassi 2019;Vestner et al 2019; Abassi and Papeo 2020), we expected to find an advantage in processing facing dyads, which we sought to capture in the neural activity (through univariate and multivariate analyses of the fMRI signal, Study 1), as well as in the participants' performance in visual recognition of multiple-body scenarios (Study 2).…”

“…Moreover, behavioural studies targeting performance-based measures of perception, have shown that, relative to other configurations, face-to-face bodies have privileged access to visual awareness in low-visibility conditions (i.e., visual categorization of stimuli with fast presentation and backward masking;Papeo et al 2017a), and are more likely to recruit attention in visual search though a crowdVestner et al 2019).Those previous results have suggested a particular visual sensitivity, or tuning, to multiple-body configurations with visuo-spatial relations that are reliably associated with social interaction, such as facingness, spatial proximity, and approaching signals (see Papeo 2020 for discussion). The new results presented here generalize to dynamic multiple-person scenarios and to the biological motion-perception cortex, the visual specialization for facing-body configurations.…”