Shared and Individual Tuning Curves for Social Perception
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22157933 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rekha S Varrier (0000-0002-8208-7220, Dartmouth College), Zishan Su (0009-0000-8023-8331, Dartmouth College), Qiyao Liang (0000-0002-3652-7360, Dartmouth College), Qi Liang (0000-0002-6766-9361, Dartmouth College), Tory G Benson (0009-0002-0715-1373, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey), Éric Jolly (0000-0002-6144-5789, Dartmouth College), Emily S Finn (0000-0001-8591-3068, Dartmouth College) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Pages | 567-593 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-17 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Open MIND (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2470-2986 • E-ISSN: 2470-2986 |
| Publisher | MIT Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1162/opmi.a.347 |
| PMID | 42158050 |
| OpenAlex | W7161140976 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 66 |
Stimuli with light are clearly visual; stimuli with sound are clearly auditory. But what makes a stimulus “social”, and how do socialness judgments differ across people? Here, we characterize group-level and individual thresholds for perceiving the presence and nature of a social interaction. We leverage the fact that humans see social interactions—e.g., chasing, playing, fighting—even in very un-lifelike stimuli, i.e., animations of geometric shapes. Unlike most prior work that used hand-crafted stimuli, we exploit these animations’ most advantageous property: their visual features are fully parameterizable. Using this property, we construct psychophysics-inspired “social tuning curves” for individuals. We find not only that simple visual features influence social perception, but also that the exact shape of the tuning curve is unique to and stable within each person. Further, individual differences in tuning curves are related to socio-affective traits. Our approach lays the foundation to study how social percepts emerge from interactions between features of a stimulus and features of an individual observer
Embodied cognition · Exploit · Perception · Visual perception · Action Observation and Synchronization · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Face Recognition and Perception
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| Highly cited | No |
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