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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Quoc Vuong
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
The interpretation of social interactions between people is important in many daily situations. The coordination of the relative body movements between them may provide visual cues that observers use without attention to discriminate such social interactions from the actions of people acting independently of each other. Previous studies highlighted brain regions involved in the visual processing of interacting versus independently acting people, including posterior superior temporal sulcus, and areas of lateral occipitotemporal and parietal cortices. Unlike these previous studies, we focused on the incidental visual processing of social interactions; that is, the processing of the body movements outside the observers’ focus of attention. In the current study, we used functional imaging to measure brain activation while participants were presented with point-light dyads portraying communicative interactions or individual actions. However, their task was to discriminate the brightness of two crosses also on the screen. To investigate brain regions that may process the spatial and temporal relationships between the point-light displays, we either reversed the facingdirection of one agent or spatially scrambled the local motion of the points. Incidental processing of communicative interactions elicited activation in right anterior STS only when the two agents were facing each other. Controlling for differences in local motion by subtracting brain activation to scrambled versions of the point-light displays revealedsignificant activation in parietal cortex for communicative interactions, as well as left amygdala and brain stem/cerebellum. Our results complement previous studies and suggest that additional brain regions may be recruited to incidentally process the spatial and temporal contingencies that distinguish people acting together from people acting individually.
Author(s): Atkinson AP, Vuong QC
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Imaging Neuroscience
Year: 2023
Pages: Epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 28/11/2023
Acceptance date: 02/11/2023
Date deposited: 30/11/2023
ISSN (electronic): 2837-6056
Publisher: MIT Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1162/imag_a_00048
DOI: 10.1162/imag_a_00048
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