Social perception : detection and interpretation of animacy, agency, and intention

422 Pages·2013·4.2 MB·English

by  Rutherford

Social Perception

SOCIAL PERCEPTION
Detection and Interpretation of Animacy, Agency, and Intention
edited by M. D. Rutherford and Valerie A. Kuhlmeier
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2 013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Social perception : detection and interpretation of animacy, agency, and intention
/ edited by M. D. Rutherford and Valerie A. Kuhlmeier.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01927-9 (hbk. : alk. paper)
1. Social perception. I. Rutherford, M. D. II. Kuhlmeier, Valerie A.
BF323.S63S643 2013
153.7 — dc23
2012049080

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
1 Introduction: The Interdisciplinary Study of Social Perception 1
M. D. Rutherford and Valerie A. Kuhlmeier
I BIOLOGICAL MOTION PERCEPTION 9
Section Introduction: Biological Motion Perception 11
Nikolaus F. Troje
2 What Is Biological Motion? Definition, Stimuli, and Paradigms 13
Nikolaus F. Troje
3 From Motion Cues to Social Perception: Innate Predispositions 37
Francesca Simion, Lara Bardi, Elena Mascalzoni, and Lucia Regolin
4 Evidence for Functional Specialization in the Human Superior
Temporal Sulcus (STS): Consideration of Biological Motion Perception
and Social Cognition 61
Emily D. Grossman
5 Beyond the Scientific Objectification of the Human Body:
Differentiated Analyses of Human Motion and Object Motion 83
Maggie Shiffrar and James P. Thomas
II THE PERCEPTION OF ANIMACY AND INTENTIONAL BEHAVIOR 109
Section Introduction: The Perception of Animacy and Intentional
Behavior 111
M. D. Rutherford and Valerie A. Kuhlmeier
6 Evidence for Specialized Perception of Animate Motion 115
M. D. Rutherford
vi Contents
7 Perceiving Intention in Animacy Displays Created from Human
Motion 139
Phil McAleer and Scott A. Love
8 Design for Learning: The Case of Chasing 171
Willem E. Frankenhuis and H. Clark Barrett
9 Perceiving Animacy and Intentionality: Visual Processing or
Higher-Level Judgment? 197
Brian J. Scholl and Tao Gao
10 How Are the Actions of Triangles and People Processed in the
Human Brain? 231
Antonia F. de C. Hamilton and Richard Ramsey
11 Infants Attribute Mental States to Nonhuman Agents 259
Yuyan Luo and You-jung Choi
12 The Social Perception of Helping and Hindering 283
Valerie A. Kuhlmeier
III RECOGNIZING AND INTERPRETING GOAL-DIRECTED BEHAVIOR IN
HUMAN ACTORS 305
Section Introduction: Recognizing and Interpreting Goal-Directed
Behavior in Human Actors 307
Jeff Loucks
13 Dwelling on Action 309
Dare Baldwin and Kara D. Sage
14 The Role of Self-Produced Movement in the Perception of Biological
Motion and Intentional Actions in Infants 331
Petra Hauf
15 Human Action Perception across Development 351
Jeff Loucks and Jessica Sommerville
16 Online Action Analysis: Infants ’ Anticipation of Others ’ Intentional
Actions 383
Amanda Woodward and Erin N. Cannon
Contributors 405
Index 407
1 Introduction: The Interdisciplinary Study of Social
Perception
M. D. Rutherford and Valerie A. Kuhlmeier
As we enter a room full of people, we instantly have a number of social
perceptions. First, and most fundamentally, we know which objects in the
room are animate and which are inanimate. With a mere glance, we can
infer that someone has agency, and from a continuous stream of behavior,
we extract goals, desires, and dispositions. The aim of this book is to
advance our understanding of those perceptual and cognitive processes
that are part of our human psychology, allowing us to experience these
percepts and understandings quickly and seemingly effortlessly.
The term social perception is most closely associated with the field of
social psychology, particularly to the theoretical and empirical work of
Fritz Heider. Heider was interested in causal attribution and schooled in
the nonsocial causal attribution that was of interest in his time, but he
made a novel advance by bringing the logic of causal attribution into the
social domain ( Sch ö npflug, 2008 ). He aimed to study the perception, rea-
soning, and evaluation of social behavior, and he suggested that this
“ social perception ” follows many of the same rules as the perception of
physical objects and nonsocial causality (e.g., Heider, 1944 ). Perhaps most
famously, he showed subjects a two-minute video of simple geometric
figures moving in relation to one another. He found that despite the “ char-
acters ” having no morphological features to suggest agency, participants
readily perceived agency and described the actions in language rich with
intentional and mental-state attributions ( Heider & Simmel, 1944 ). Of
particular interest to Heider was the process of perception— that is, the
properties of stimuli that produce the phenomenon of social interaction.
As stated in that seminal paper, “ our aim has not been to determine the
correctness of the response, but instead the dependence of the response
on stimulus-configurations” ( Heider & Simmel, 1944 , p. 244).
Further, Heider and Simmel (1944) noted that the movements of
the shapes were “ organized in terms of acts of persons” (p. 256) and that
2 M. D. Rutherford and V. A. Kuhlmeier
observers described “ what motive or need within that person, is respon-
sible for the movement” (p. 257). Heider expanded on these findings and
others in his 1958 book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations , in which
he posited two construals for perceiving and understanding the behavior
of others: impersonal causality and personal causality. The former applies
to unintentional behavior, such as sneezing, yawning, or holding an
emotion such as sadness, while the latter applies to actions that are inten-
tional or purposeful (Heider, 1958). As Malle (2008) points out, however,
the distinction that Heider made between intentional and unintentional
models faded within social psychological research as the evolving attribu-
tion theory instead emphasized inferences of stable dispositions and con-
sidered differences between attributions based on traits versus situations
(e.g., Jones & Davis, 1965 ; Kelley, 1967 ).
Thus, while Heider is often considered one of the major influences in
attribution research within social psychology (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 1991 ),
his emphasis on the perception of intentional action may have had even
greater influence within the field of developmental psychology. Research
in this field (coupled with work in neuroscience and comparative cognitive
psychology) has laid the groundwork for a vast literature on theory of
mind, examining the ability to represent others’ agency, intentions, desires,
and beliefs. Within this literature exist seminal models of the causal under-
standing of behavior (e.g., Leslie, 1995 ; Premack & Premack, 1995 ; see
Sperber, Premack, & Premack, 1995 , for a collection) and models of early,
infant construals of goal-directed action (e.g., Baird & Baldwin, 2001 ;
Gergely et al. 1995 ; Woodward, 1998 ).
Consideration of social perception outside of the major thrust of social
psychology can also be seen in vision science. In particular, the study of
biological motion (often depicted through point-light displays that show
dots moving along with major joints of the body) has focused on both the
mechanisms of perceptual organization that allow for the integration of
the dots into the shape of a body (e.g., Johansson, 1973 ) and the social
significance of the motion (see Troje, this volume, for discussion of both).
The latter, through the use of point-light displays, allows for the examina-
tion of social perception from movement patterns in the near absence of
other morphological features. Relatedly, the study of animate motion (in
which whole objects move in space relative to each other) often uses dis-
plays similar to those of Heider and Simmel (1944) and examines the
perception of social causality and agency (e.g., Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000 ).
The focus of this book is on these aspects of social perception. That is,
the work presented does not follow the traditional routes of attribution
Introduction 3
theory (though attributions of dispositions and preferences to explain goal-
directed action are touched on in chapters by Luo and Choi and by Kuhl-
meier); instead, the emphasis is on the visual detection and interpretation
of intentional social entities. Three caveats are in order, though. First, this
book focuses on movement and action, which means that exciting recent
work in face perception is not included (see C alder, Rhodes, Johnson, &
Haxby, 2011 , for summary). Second, since excellent volumes and review
papers about theory-of-mind research into desire and belief representations
already exist (see B aron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg, & Cohen, 1993 ; M alle,
2004 ; Wellman, 1990 ; Wellman & Liu, 2004 ), that field of research is not
covered here. Finally, although this book has some conceptual overlap (and
common authors) with an oft-cited volume, Intentions and Intentionality:
Foundations of Social Cognition ( Malle, Moses, & Baldwin, 2001 ), the present
volume places greater emphasis on vision science, developmental science,
and neuroscience owing to a recent upswing in research in these areas
coupled with technological advances.
Theoretical Frameworks and Methodological Paradigms
This book was developed and organized at a workshop held in June of 2011
at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Authors from all of the
contributed chapters were invited to spend several days together and to
present their chapters to one another. The idea behind the meeting was
to allow for integration across chapters; the goal was a collection of chap-
ters telling a coherent story about three aspects of social perception:
(1) the perception of biological motion, (2) the perception of animacy and
the attributions of intentionality made based on animate motion, and
(3) The recognition and interpretation of goal directed behavior, based on
human action. The meeting provided a venue for conversation among
researchers studying these topics; among those included were researchers
who mainly see themselves as vision scientists, those who are developmen-
tal psychologists, those who are known for their research in autism, and
those who rely on imaging technology for their work in neuroscience.
It was evident in the conversations that there are theoretical frameworks
and methodological paradigms that cut across four areas:
Developmental science is and has been important to our understanding
of the human psychology that allows for social perception. Much of this
work has considered the human infant, with research made possible
by innovations in methodologies such as the habituation paradigm, the
visual-expectation paradigm, eye-tracking (see Woodward & Cannon, this