Converging evidence that left extrastriate body area supports visual sensitivity to social interactions

Gandolfo, Marco; Abassi, Etienne; Balgova, Eva; Downing, Paul E.; Papeo, Liuba; Koldewyn, Kami

doi:10.1101/2023.05.23.541943

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 80 publications

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“…Third, specialized dyadic processing is thought to affect judgments of interpersonal distance (Vestner et al, 2019). Fourth, our stimuli closely resemble those used in neuroimaging studies to reveal the representation of facing dyads in the social perception network (Abassi & Papeo, 2020;Gandolfo et al, 2024;Quadflieg et al, 2015). Fifth, comparable judgments of interocular distance are thought to engage specialized face processing (e.g., Leder et al, 2001).…”

Section: Move Closermentioning

confidence: 97%

Autistic adults exhibit typical sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance

Bunce,

Gehdu,

Press

et al. 2024

Autism Research

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The visual processing differences seen in autism often impede individuals' visual perception of the social world. In particular, many autistic people exhibit poor face recognition. Here, we sought to determine whether autistic adults also show impaired perception of dyadic social interactions—a class of stimulus thought to engage face‐like visual processing. Our focus was the perception of interpersonal distance. Participants completed distance change detection tasks, in which they had to make perceptual decisions about the distance between two actors. On half of the trials, participants judged whether the actors moved closer together; on the other half, whether they moved further apart. In a nonsocial control task, participants made similar judgments about two grandfather clocks. We also assessed participants' face recognition ability using standardized measures. The autistic and nonautistic observers showed similar levels of perceptual sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance when viewing social interactions. As expected, however, the autistic observers showed clear signs of impaired face recognition. Despite putative similarities between the visual processing of faces and dyadic social interactions, our results suggest that these two facets of social vision may dissociate.

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Section: Move Closermentioning

confidence: 97%

Autistic adults exhibit typical sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance

Bunce,

Gehdu,

Press

et al. 2024

Autism Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Category-Selective Representation of Relationships in the Visual Cortex

Abassi,

Papeo

2023

J. Neurosci.

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Understanding social interaction requires processing social agents and their relationship. Latest results show that much of this process is visually solved: visual areas can represent multiple people encoding emergent information about their interaction that is not explained by the response to the individuals alone. A neural signature of this process is an increased response in visual areas, to face-to-face (seemingly interacting) people, relative to people presented as unrelated (back-to-back). This effect highlighted a network of visual areas for representing relational information.How is this network organized?Using functional MRI, we measured brain activity of healthy female and male humans (N=42), in response to images of two faces or two (head-blurred) bodies, facing toward or away from each other. Taking thefacing>non-facingeffect as signature of relation perception, we found that relations between faces and between bodies were coded in distinct areas, mirroring the categorical representation of faces and bodies in visual cortex. Additional analyses suggest the existence of a third network encoding relations between (non-social) objects. Finally, a separate occipitotemporal network showed generalization of relational information across body, face and non-social object dyads (multivariate-pattern classification analysis), revealing shared properties of relations across categories. In sum, beyond single entities, visual cortex encodes the relations that bind multiple entities into relationships; it does so in a category-selective fashion, thus respecting a general organizing principle of representation in high-level vision. Visual areas encoding visual relational information can reveal the processing of emergent properties of social (and non-social) interaction which trigger inferential processes.Significance statementUnderstanding social interaction requires representing the actors as well as the relation between them. We show that the earliest, rudimentary representation of a social interaction is formed in visual cortex. Using fMRI on healthy adults, we measured the brain responses to two faces or two (head-blurred) bodies, and found that, beyond representing faces and bodies, the visual cortex represents their relations, distinguishing between seemingly interacting (face-to-face) and non-interacting (back-to-back) faces/bodies. Moreover, we found that information about face and body relations is represented in separate networks, in line with the general organizing principle of categorical representation in visual cortex. The brain network encoding visual relational information may represent emergent properties of interacting people, which underlie the cognitive representation of social interaction.

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Converging evidence that left extrastriate body area supports visual sensitivity to social interactions

Cited by 2 publications

References 80 publications

Autistic adults exhibit typical sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance

Autistic adults exhibit typical sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance

Category-Selective Representation of Relationships in the Visual Cortex

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