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Poster C in Poster Session C: Wednesday, August 5, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Stable Selectivity to Social Interactions Across Visual Perspective in the Human Brain

Niloufar Faridani¹, Emalie McMahon², Maryam Vaziri-Pashkam¹; ¹University of Delaware, ²Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Presenter: Niloufar Faridani

In the natural social environment, humans experience social interactions from both first- and third-person perspectives. Previous studies of social interaction have mostly used videos that show social interactions from a third-person perspective. These studies have identified the social interaction Superior Temporal Sulcus (SI-STS) as a key region for representing social interactions. Here, we used natural videos of people engaged in interactive and non-interactive actions in both first- and third-person perspective to test whether SI-STS selectivity to social interactions generalizes across visual perspectives. The videos were first behaviorally validated to ensure that participants could make reliable judgments of interactiveness and visual perspective. Participants then viewed these videos in an fMRI experiment. Results showed stronger responses to interactive than non-interactive actions in SI-STS that remained stable across visual perspectives.

Topic Area: Computational Models of Vision & Visual Cortex