Innovators in
Cognitive Neuroscience

Leyla Isik

Johns Hopkins University

January 23, 2023 at 2:30 PM ET

Charitable cause:
DC Abortion Fund

Title:
The neural basis of real-world social interaction perception

Abstract:
Humans perceive the world in rich social detail. We effortlessly recognize not only objects and faces in our environment, but also other peoples’ social interactions. The ability to perceive and understand social interactions is critical for maintaining relationships and functioning in our social world. We recently identified a region that selectively represents others’ social interactions in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) using controlled experiments with simple stimuli. 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 this talk I will discuss new work using naturalistic video paradigms and novel machine learning analyses to understand how humans process social interactions in natural settings. We find that social interactions guide behavioral judgements and are selectively processed in the brain, even after controlling for the effects of other visual and social information. Finally, I will discuss the computational implications of humans’ social interaction selectivity and new modeling work to develop artificial systems that share this core human ability.

American Sign language (ASL) interpretation and
closed captioning will be provided.