Shared and individual tuning curves for social vision.

ABSTRACT: 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 like animations of geometric shapes. Unlike prior work using these stimuli, we exploit their most advantageous property: their visual features are fully parameterizable. Using this property, we construct psychophysics-inspired "social tuning curves" for individual subjects. We find not only that simple visual features influence social perception, but also that the exact relationsh

SUBMITTER: Varrier RS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11761700 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature