SCALab Seminar- Liuba Papeo

Twos in human visual perception
Human vision serves the social function of detecting and discriminating with high efficiency conspecifics and other animals. The social world is made of social entities as much as of the relations between those entities. Our recent work demonstrates that human vision encodes visuo-spatial relations between bodies with the same efficiency and high specialization of face/body perception. I will present a set of behavioral, functional MRI and EEG results that illustrate how the representation of social interaction emerges from object perception, through the analysis of spatial relations between two or more bodies in visual scenes. I will discuss how a network of visual areas sensitive to spatial relations between multiple objects (i.e., bodies) may give rise to the earliest rudimentary representation of a social interaction, based on the mere physical structure of the input.