Periodic Reporting for period 3 - THEMPO (The missing link between Perception and Cognition: The case of multiple-person scenarios)
Período documentado: 2021-03-01 hasta 2022-08-31
First, our research on visual perception is contributing to address the goals and boundaries of human vision. Our findings show that visual perception goes beyond segmentation and recognition of single objects, processing with high efficiency and specialization the relations between them, which give rise to representations of scenes and events.
Second, the capacity to form and manipulate relational representations is considered a fundamental, possibly unique, aspect of human intelligence. THEMPO seeks to explain how the mind/brain transforms visual input into object representations and objects representations into structured representations of scenes or events, where the relation with the others specifies the role of each part.
Finally, perceptual tasks involving socially relevant stimuli have contributed to highlight differences in social sensitivity between individuals with pervasive developmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and the normal population. We address this relationship using the newly defined category of multiple-person relations. Showing that performance in our visual perception tasks varies with the inter-individual variation in social cognitive abilities is a critical test-bed for the hypothesis that perception concerns the social domain. Moreover, our experimental stimuli and tasks can provide new tools for assessment in ASD, offering performance-based measures of the individual’s abilities, without requiring explicit reports, judgments or verbal instructions. This represents a significant advantage for assessment of individuals with communication difficulties. Moreover, the tasks developed in THEMPO have been adapted to study the development of visual discrimination based visuo-spatial relations between people, in subjects as young as 6-month-olds. Thus, our research can meet the joint effort of cognitive and clinical neuropsychologists to develop tasks that can capture early alterations in basic perceptual functions relevant for social cognition.
We have published four papers (Papeo, Goupil, Soto-Faraco, 2020 ; Papeo, Abassi, 2019; Abassi & Papeo, 2020; Papeo, 2020) and three are under review (Adibpour, Hochmann & Papeo, 2020; Goupil, Papeo & Hochmann, 2020; Bellot, Abassi & Papeo, 2020).
Dissemination through participation to scientific events:
L. Papeo has organized the Symposium “Seeing Relations: From Multiple-Object Perception to the Representation of Social Events”, at the International Convention of Psychological Science 2019, Paris.
Other contributions:
Talks
L. Papeo (selected): Vision Science Society conference 2019; Language Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, May 2019; Department of Psychology, Harvard University, May 2019; the Science of Social Interaction Workshop, Bangor University, UK, Sept 2018
E. Abassi: Virtual Vision Science Society Conference 2020
Posters:
FENS 2020 Virtual forum, July 11-15, 2020¬ (E. Bellot: poster AWARDED)
Virtual Vision Science Society Conference 2020 (C. Spriet)
International Congress for Infant Studies Virtual Congress 2020 (C. Spriet)
Organization for the Human Brain Mapping 2019 (P. Adibpour)
European Conference on Visual Perception 2019 (P. Adibpour)
International Convention of Psychological Science, 2019 (E. Abassi)
Concepts Actions and Objects Workshop, Rovereto, Italy, May 2018 (2018)
Future developments of THEMPO concern three main issues. First, we aim at understanding the mechanisms underlying the representation of social interaction in visual areas, in relation to other brain networks involved in the representation social interaction (e.g. action understanding or theory-of-mind networks). Second, we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to establish brain-behavior causal relationship, by testing the functional relevance of the brain areas responsive during perception of interacting bodies. Third, our research provides strong indications of domain specificity in the visual system and its precocious appearance in development. We will address the emergence of the visual specialization for two-body stimuli in the context of the larger functional organization of the human visual system. By studying young infants, we study how the ability to process visuo-spatial relations between multiple objects and to use this information for discrimination of complex visual scenes relates to the development of object categorization in human vision.