It's not all in the face: reduced face visibility does not modulate social segmentation

The role of visual and auditory information in social event segmentation

Humans organise their social worlds into social and nonsocial events. Social event segmentation refers to the ability to parse the environmental content into social and nonsocial events or units. Here, we investigated the role that perceptual information from visual and auditory modalities, in isolation and in conjunction, played in social event segmentation. Participants viewed a video clip depicting an interaction between two actors and marked the boundaries of social and nonsocial events. Depending on the condition, the clip at first contained only auditory or only visual information. Then, the clip was shown containing both auditory and visual information. Higher overall group consensus and response consistency in parsing the clip was found for social segmentation and when both auditory and visual information was available. Presenting the clip in the visual domain only benefitted group agreement in social segmentation while the inclusion of auditory information (under the audiovisual condition) also improved response consistency in nonsocial segmentation. Thus, social segmentation utilises information from the visual modality, with the auditory cues contributing under ambiguous or uncertain conditions and during segmentation of nonsocial content.

Attention promotes accurate impression formation

OBJECTIVE

An ability to form accurate impressions of others is vital for adaptive social behavior in humans. Here, we examined if attending to persons more is associated with greater accuracy in personality impressions.

METHOD

We asked 42 observers (36 females; mean age = 21 years, age range = 18-28; expected power = 0.96) to form personality impressions of unacquainted individuals (i.e., targets) from video interviews while their attentional behavior was assessed using eye tracking. We examined whether (a) attending more to targets benefited accuracy, (b) attending to specific body parts (e.g., face vs. body) drove this association, and (c) targets' ease of personality readability modulated these effects.

RESULTS

Paying more attention to a target was associated with forming more accurate personality impressions. Attention to the whole person contributed to this effect, with this association occurring independently of targets' ease of readability.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings show that attending more to a person is associated with increased accuracy and thus suggest that attention promotes social adaption by supporting accurate social perception.

Taking it out of context: The role of contextual coherence during social event segmentation

Social event segmentation, or parsing of the ongoing dynamic content into discrete social events, is thought to represent a mechanism that supports the expert human ability to navigate complex social environments. Here, we examined whether this ability is influenced by the temporal coherence of the context and by different sources of perceptual information. To do so, we created two video clips, one in which several situations unfolded in a contextually consistent manner, and the other in which the order of these situations was scrambled using a random sequence. Participants viewed each clip and were asked to mark social and nonsocial events in counterbalanced blocks of trials. We analyzed key-press behaviour as well as visual and auditory signals within the clips. Results showed that participants agreed on similar social and nonsocial events regardless of context availability, with greater agreement for social relative to nonsocial events. Context, however, modulated the reliance on sources of perceptual information, such that visual and auditory information was used differently when context was unavailable. Together, these data show that contextual coherence does not determine social event segmentation but serves a modulatory role in perceivers' reliance on perceptual sources of information when identifying events in complex social environments.