Our results in work package 1 suggest that typical adults preferentially attend to social interactions over even other social information and form complex and nuanced judgements about observed interactions on the basis of very little information (e.g. Skripkauskaite et al, 2023; Newey et al, 2021). Neurally, our results suggest that a region in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) is centrally involved (e.g. Isik et al, 2017; Walbrin et al, 2018) - at least when interactive information is dynamic and unfolds over time (e.g. Landsiedel et al, 2022). In contrast, a region that is sensitive to body information, the Extrastriate Body Area (EBA) may be involved enabling the first stages of interaction perception through supporting the quick detection of interacting dyads (Gandolfo et al, 2023) and thus is sometimes also part of the network that is engaged during dynamic interaction processing (e.g. Walbrin et al., 2019). This network is sensitive and ‘codes’ for many aspects of the content of interactions, including who is involved, what emotion(s) are being expressed, and the actions that interactors engage in (e.g. Walbrin et al, 2018, 2019). These regions, particularly the pSTS, are also sensitive to interactive cues in the auditory domain (Landsiedel & Koldewyn, 2023).
The work in work packages 2 and 3 has shown that brain regions and networks that are active in adults are also active in children but are not yet fully tuned for interactive information (Walbrin et al, 2020). Interestingly, children utilise higher order social cognitive networks to support their processing/understanding of observed interactions while adults appear to rely almost entirely on social perception systems (Walbrin et al, 2023). These systems and skills appear to develop over during early to middle adolescence. Indeed, although children also show preferential attention to social interactions, they do not extract the same social judgements from observed interactions that adults do. Children and young adolescents interpret social scenes more ‘conservatively’ than adults – they are less willing to label ambiguous scenarios as “social interactions” and make fewer social inferences about such scenes than do adults. Children who struggle with social interaction perception are also more likely to struggle with ‘simple’ emotion perception and face processing and face production tasks. Similarly, adolescents and adults who are on the autistic spectrum, or are socially anxious, socially isolated, or experience chronic loneliness interpret social scenes more negatively and process them differently.
Together, the work across the project has greatly increased our understanding of the networks that support complex social perception and how they develop. The continuing work in the lab made possible by the grant holds promise for building our understanding of limits of this system when processing information from non-human interactant as well as how this system is altered when individuals struggle to understand or engage with social interactions. The continuing work in the lab made possible by the grant holds promise for building our understanding of limits of this system when processing information from non-human interactant as well as how this system is altered when individuals struggle to understand or engage with social interactions.
