Further details to follow.
Our last seminar for Fall 2022 term will be Dec 6 at 14:30 with speaker Leyla Isik from Johns Hopkins joining us. The talk will be virtual and on Zoom.
Title: The neural computations underlying real-world social interaction perception
Abstract:
Humans
perceive
the
world
in
rich
social
detail.
We
effortlessly
recognize
not
only
objects
and
people
in
our
environment,
but
also
social
interactions
between
people.
The
ability
to
perceive
and
understand
social
interactions
is
critical
for
functioning
in
our
social
world.
We
recently
identified
a
brain
region
that
selectively
represents
others’
social
interactions
in
the
posterior
superior
temporal
sulcus
(pSTS)
in
a
manner
that
is
distinct
from
other
visual
and
social
processes,
like
face
recognition
and
theory
of
mind.
However,
it
is
unclear
how
social
interactions
are
processed
in
the
real
world
where
they
co-vary
with
many
other
sensory
and
social
features.
In
the
first
part
of
my
talk,
I
will
discuss
new
work
using
naturalistic
movie
fMRI
paradigms
and
novel
machine
learning
analyses
to
understand
how
humans
process
social
interactions
in
real-world
settings.
We
find
that
social
interactions
guide
behavioral
judgements
and
are
selectively
processed
in
the
pSTS,
even
after
controlling
for
the
effects
of
other
co-varying
perceptual
and
social
information,
including
faces,
voices,
and
theory
of
mind.
In
the
second
part
of
my
talk,
I
will
discuss
the
computational
implications
of
social
interaction
selectivity
and
present
a
novel
graph
neural
network
model,
SocialGNN,
that
instantiates
these
insights.
SocialGNN
reproduces
human
social
interaction
judgements
in
both
controlled
and
natural
videos
using
only
visual
information,
but
requires
relational,
graph
structure
and
processing
to
do
so.
Together,
this
work
suggests
that
social
interaction
recognition
is
a
core
human
ability
that
relies
on
specialized,
structured
visual
representations.