Are people special? A brain’s eye view.

Atkinson, A.P.; Heberlein, A.S.; Adolphs, R.

Abstract

Introduction: In this chapter our focus will be on people as visual stimuli, that is, objects that have a certain appearance and that move in a certain way, and whose said visual properties we can use as the basis for attributing the states and traits, intentions and actions of other people. By focusing on the visuoperceptual aspects of social cognition, we acknowledge of course that people are much more than visual objects: they have characteristic auditory, olfactory, and tactile properties, and they are also social agents, who act, react and interact, and with whom we talk, cooperate, fight and fall in love. Studying people qua visual objects will by no means tell us all there is to know about ourselves as social creatures or even about how we understand others as social agents; but as we shall illustrate, important advances have been made in particular at this level of information processing. And one of those important advances is that we are now beginning to understand, at the level of brain function, how being a social agent may be at the very core of perceiving others as social agents. In part this is a reflection of the fact that processes central to being a person, to having emotions, intentions, and the ability to act in certain ways, are intrinsic to the act of perceiving another person. That is not all, however. First, persons and their brains are necessarily located within bodies, and there is growing evidence that we can use our own bodily responses and their neural representations to model the states of others. Second, human social life is both active and interactive. We actively explore our social environments and engage with other people. It is not just our brains that enable and structure our skillful engagements with others, but also those people themselves. Yet those other people are not just passive sensory objects; they are also engaging with us. There is a dynamic interplay between social agents, whose thoughts, feelings, and judgments about each other will thus evolve over time. These interactive aspects of human social life have long been central to social psychology and other social sciences, but have not been fully appreciated in social neuroscience. Nonetheless, as we shall see, inroads into how brain mechanisms contribute to enactive social perception and cognition are increasingly evident, with important implications for claims about the functional specialization of brain mechanisms for social perception and cognition.

Citation

Atkinson, A., Heberlein, A., & Adolphs, R. (2010). Are people special? A brain’s eye view. In R. Adams Jr., N. Ambady, K. Nakayama, & S. Shimojo (Eds.), The science of social vision (363-392). Oxford University Press

• Publication Date: 2010
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Pages: 363-392
• Book Title: The science of social vision.
• Publisher URL: http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Psychology/CognitivePsychology/?view=usa&sf=toc&ci=9780195333176