Paying Attention to Social Meaning: An fMRI Study

Abstract

Animations of simple geometric shapes are readily interpreted as animate agents engaged in meaningful social interactions. Such animations have been shown to activate brain regions implicated in the detection of animate motion, in understanding the intentions of others as well as areas commonly linked to the processing of social and emotional information. However, attribution of animacy does not occur under all circumstances and the precise conditions under which specific regions are activated remains unclear. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study we manipulated viewers' perspective to assess the part played by selective attention. Participants were cued to attend either to spatial properties of the movements or to the kind of social behavior it could represent. Activations that occurred to the initial cue, while observing the animations themselves and while responding to a postpresentation probe, were analyzed separately. Results showed that activity in the social brain network was strongly influenced by selective attention, and that remarkably similar activations were seen during film viewing and in response to probe questions. Our use of stimuli supporting rich and diverse social narratives likely enhanced the influence of top-down processes on neural activity in the social brain.

Neural correlates of causality judgment in physical and social context—The reversed effects of space and time

“…It has been suggested, that the medial frontal cortex plays an important role to determine future behavior of others (Amodio and Frith, 2006). Tavares et al showed widespread brain activations for highly animated rated stimuli, including the bilateral frontal gyrus, the right superior temporal sulcus and amygdala (Tavares et al, 2008). They concluded that the perception of social causality does not have to be triggered by perceptual systems.…”

“…Schlottmann et al, 2006) we expected opposite effects of our stimulus manipulations on physical and social causality: Small deviations in the stimulus (small angle and short time delay) lead to causal judgment in the physical task, and non-causal judgment in the social task, whereas large deviations (great angle and long time delay) lead to the opposite judgments. In the fMRI analyses, we expect to find different brain activations during physical and social tasks in brain regions predominantly related to perceptual (e.g., for physical task and spatial effects in the parietal lobe, and temporal effects in the supplementary motor area (SMA) and the basal ganglia (Straube and Chatterjee, 2010;Straube et al, 2011)) and inferential (e.g., for social tasks in the prefrontal cortex (Tavares et al, 2008)) processing mechanisms. The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) has previously been described as instantiating several psychological mechanisms (e.g.…”

Quinean social skills: empirical evidence from eye-gaze against information encapsulation

“…While the research does not deny the pull of intentional explanation-indeed, it aims to explain why such explanation is so viable-it does suggest it results from a complex interplay of factors, some of which are clearly social. Similarly, Tavares et al (2008) have demonstrated different brain activation in response to the movement of abstract shapes depending on whether the subject was cued to attend to spatial or social characteristics of the movement. In both cases, evidence suggests influence for higher social levels feeding into the ''perception'' of intentionality itself, rather than lowlevel encapsulated mandating of intentional perception.…”

Using modified incremental chart parsing to ascribe intentions to animated geometric figures

“…Schultz, Imamizu, Kawato, & Frith, 2004). Notably, we did not use shapes that indicate affordances, such as rectangles or lines that represent houses or barriers (e.g., Baker, Saxe, & Tenenbaum, 2009;Castelli et al, 2000;Heider & Simmel, 1944;Tavares, Lawrence, & Barnard, 2008), or background contexts that were cartoon characterizations of real-world objects (Wheatley et al, 2007). By using circles, which do not have a line of symmetry, we could use a simpler model that did not have to determine or track the direction the shapes were facing, a cue that people use to detect intentions (e.g., Blythe et al, 1999;Gao, Newman, & Scholl, 2009).…”