Prospects for direct social perception: a multi-theoretical integration to further the science of social cognition

The Dynamical Hypothesis in Situ: Challenges and Opportunities for a Dynamical Social Approach to Interpersonal Coordination

Over the past three decades, Van Gelder's dynamical hypothesis has been instrumental in reconceptualizing the ways in which perception-action-cognition unfolds over time and in context. Here, I examine how the dynamical approach has enriched the theoretical understanding of social dynamics within cognitive science, with a particular focus on interpersonal coordination. I frame this review around seven principles in dynamical systems: three that are well-represented in interpersonal coordination research to date (emergent behavior, context-sensitive behavior, and attractors) and four that could be useful opportunities for future growth (hysteresis, sensitivity to initial conditions, equifinality, and reciprocal compensation). In addition to identifying specific promising lines of theoretical inquiry, I focus on the significant potential afforded by computationally intensive science-especially in naturally occurring data or trace data. Building on the foundation laid over the past three decades, I argue that looking to increasingly situated and naturalistic settings (and data) is not only necessary to realize the full commitment to the dynamical hypothesis but is also critical to building parsimonious and principled theories of social phenomena.

Optimus Primed: Media Cultivation of Robot Mental Models and Social Judgments

Media influence people's perceptions of reality broadly and of technology in particular. Robot villains and heroes-from Ultron to Wall-E-have been shown to serve a specific cultivation function, shaping people's perceptions of those embodied social technologies, especially when individuals do not have direct experience with them. To date, however, little is understood about the nature of the conceptions people hold for what robots are, how they work, and how they may function in society, as well as the media antecedents and relational effects of those cognitive structures. This study takes a step toward bridging that gap by exploring relationships among individuals' recall of robot characters from popular media, their mental models for actual robots, and social evaluations of an actual robot. Findings indicate that mental models consist of a small set of common and tightly linked components (beyond which there is a good deal of individual difference), but robot character recall and evaluation have little association with whether people hold any of those components. Instead, data are interpreted to suggest that cumulative sympathetic evaluations of robot media characters may form heuristics that are primed by and engaged in social evaluations of actual robots, while technical content in mental models is associated with a more utilitarian approach to actual robots.

Learning and Embodied Cognition: A Review and Proposal

The objective of this review is to investigate research in instructional methods and embodied cognition in order to suggest the idea that a professor’s movement provides information by increasing levels of exogenous embodiment. This review describes how teaching methods varying in human activity lead to different outcomes and how those outcomes may be linked to the presence of an active body providing instruction. The embodied cognition literature suggests the physical actions we perform and the actions being performed around us shape our mental experience. We argue that students mentally imitate the gestures of their professor, this activity contributes to the embodied experience one has in a classroom, and that this increased activity leads to increased recall. One possible reason for increased student learning in human-centered environments is the activation of mirror neurons. Implications for teaching topics in a psychology classroom are discussed.

A Sensorimotor Signature of the Transition to Conscious Social Perception: Co-regulation of Active and Passive Touch

It is not yet well understood how we become conscious of the presence of other people as being other subjects in their own right. Developmental and phenomenological approaches are converging on a relational hypothesis: my perception of a "you" is primarily constituted by another subject's attention being directed toward "me." This is particularly the case when my body is being physically explored in an intentional manner. We set out to characterize the sensorimotor signature of the transition to being aware of the other by re-analyzing time series of embodied interactions between pairs of adults (recorded during a "perceptual crossing" experiment). Measures of turn-taking and movement synchrony were used to quantify social coordination, and transfer entropy was used to quantify direction of influence. We found that the transition leading to one's conscious perception of the other's presence was indeed characterized by a significant increase in one's passive reception of the other's tactile stimulations. Unexpectedly, one's clear experience of such passive touch was consistently followed by a switch to active touching of the other, while the other correspondingly became more passive, which suggests that this intersubjective experience was reciprocally co-regulated by both participants.

Sense of Place, Fast and Slow: The Potential Contributions of Affordance Theory to Sense of Place

Over the past 40 years, the sense of place concept has been well-established across a range of applications and settings; however, most theoretical developments have “privileged the slow.” Evidence suggests that place attachments and place meanings are slow to evolve, sometimes not matching material or social reality (lag effects), and also tending to inhibit change. Here, we present some key blind spots in sense of place scholarship and then suggest how a reconsideration of sense of place as “fast” and “slow” could fill them. By this, we mean how direct and immediate perception–action processes presented in affordance theory (resulting in immediately perceived place meanings) can complement slower forms of social construction presented in sense of place scholarship. Key blind spots are that sense of place scholarship: (1) rarely accounts for sensory or immediately perceived meanings; (2) pays little attention to how place meanings are the joint product of attributes of environmental features and the attributes of the individual; and (3) assumes that the relationship between place attachment and behavior is linear and not constituted in dynamic relations among mind, culture, and environment. We show how these blind spots can begin to be addressed by reviewing key insights from affordance theory, and through the presentation of applied examples. We discuss future empirical research directions in terms of: (1) how sense of place is both perceived and socially constructed; (2) whether perceived and socially constructed dimensions of place can relate to one another when perceived meanings become unsituated; and (3) how place attachment may change over different stages of the life course based upon dynamic relationships between processes of perception–action and social construction. We conclude with insights into how processes of perception–action and social construction could be included in the design and management of urban landscapes.

The new hybrids: Continuing debates on social perception

I evaluate several attempts to integrate standard theories of social cognition, either theory theory or simulation theory, with aspects of interaction theory, and especially with the concept of direct social perception. I refer to these as new hybrid theories of social cognition. One of the new hybrids accomplishes the integration only by weakening the concept of mindreading or by understanding mindreading as targeting the shared situation rather than the other's mental states. Hybrids that attempt to accommodate the idea of direct perception of mental states grant a phenomenological directness only by maintaining tacit (theory-based) inferences on the subpersonal level. If such inferential processes are thought to be extra-perceptual, then perception is neither sufficient nor direct for an understanding of intentions and emotions. Moreover, insistence on top-down inferential processes trades off against the possibility of plasticity in the perceptual system itself. I suggest that a better model than a hybrid theory would be a pluralist one. A pluralist approach to social cognition would treat theoretical inference, simulation, direct perception, interactive skills, etc. as different strategies. The real challenge is to work out a pluralist account of subpersonal processes.