Visual Preference for Socially Relevant Spatial Relations in Humans and Monkeys.

As a powerful social signal, a body, face, or gaze facing toward oneself holds an individual's attention. We asked whether, going beyond an egocentric stance, facingness between others has a similar effect and why. In a preferential-looking time paradigm, human adults showed spontaneous preference to look at two bodies facing toward (vs.

Intermodulation responses show integration of interacting bodies in a new whole.

People are often seen among other people, relating to and interacting with one another. Recent studies suggest that socially relevant spatial relations between bodies, such as the face-to-face positioning, or facingness, change the visual representation of those bodies, relative to when the same items appear unrelated (e.g.

Visual perception grounding of social cognition in preverbal infants.

Social life is inherently relational, entailing the ability to recognize and monitor social entities and the relationships between them. Very young infants privilege socially relevant entities in the visual world, such as faces and bodies. Here, we show that six-month-old infants also discriminate between configurations of multiple human bodies, based on the internal visuo-spatial relations between bodies, which could cue-or not-social interaction.

Visual Search for People Among People.

Humans can effectively search visual scenes by spatial location, visual feature, or whole object. Here, we showed that visual search can also benefit from fast appraisal of relations between individuals in human groups. Healthy adults searched for a facing (seemingly interacting) body dyad among nonfacing dyads or a nonfacing dyad among facing dyads.