Heads First: Visual Aftereffects Reveal Hierarchical Integration of Cues to Social Attention

Visual perspective taking and action understanding

Understanding what others are doing is a fundamental aspect of social cognition and a skill that is arguably linked to visuospatial perspective taking (VPT), the ability to apprehend the spatial layout of a scene from another's perspective. Yet, with few and notable exceptions, action understanding and VPT are rarely studied together. Participants (43 females, 37 males) made judgements about the spatial layout of objects in a scene from the perspective of an avatar who was positioned at 0°, 90°, 270° or 180° relative to the participant. In a variant of a traditional VPT task, the avatar either interacted with the objects in the scene, by pointing to or reaching for them, or was present but did not engage with the objects. Although the task was identical across all conditions - to say whether a target object is to the right or left of a control object - we show that the avatar's actions modulates performance. Specifically, participants were more accurate when the avatar engaged with the target object, and correspondingly, less accurate and slower when the avatar interacted with the control objects. As these effects were independent of the angular disparity between participant and avatar perspectives, we conclude that action understanding and VPT are likely linked via the rapid deployment of two separate cognitive mechanisms. All participants provided a measure of self-reported empathy and we show that response times decrease with increasing empathy scores for female but not for male participants. However, within the range of 'typical' empathy scores, defined here as the interquartile range where 50 % of the data lie, females were faster than males. These findings lend further insight into the relationship between spatial and social perspective taking.

Did you skip leg day? The neural mechanisms of muscle perception for body parts

While the neural mechanisms underpinning the perception of muscularity are poorly understood, recent progress has been made using the psychophysical technique of visual adaptation. Prolonged visual exposure to high (low) muscularity bodies causes subsequently viewed bodies to appear less (more) muscular, revealing a recalibration of the neural populations encoding muscularity. Here, we use visual adaptation to further elucidate the tuning properties of the neural processes underpinning muscle perception for the upper and lower halves of the body. Participants manipulated the apparent muscularity of upper and lower bodies until they appeared 'normal', prior to and following exposure to a series of top/bottom halves of bodies that were either high or low in muscularity. In Experiment 1, participants were adapted to isolated own-gender body halves from one of four conditions; increased (muscularity) upper (body half), increased lower, decreased upper, or decreased lower. Despite the presence of muscle aftereffects when the body halves the participants viewed and manipulated were congruent, there was only weak evidence of muscle aftereffect transfer between the upper and lower halves of the body. Aftereffects were significantly weaker when body halves were incongruent, implying minimal overlap in the neural mechanisms encoding muscularity for body half. Experiment 2 examined the generalisability of Experiment 1's findings in a more ecologically valid context using whole-body stimuli, producing a similar pattern of results as Experiment 1, but with no evidence of cross-adaptation. Taken together, the findings are most consistent with muscle-encoding neural populations that are body-half selective. As visual adaptation has been implicated in cases of body size and shape misperception, the present study furthers our current understanding of how these perceptual inaccuracies, particularly those involving muscularity, are developed, maintained, and may potentially be treated.

Perceptual aftereffects of adiposity transfer from hands to whole bodies

Adaptation aftereffects for features such as identity and gender have been shown to transfer between faces and bodies, and faces and body parts, i.e. hands. However, no studies have investigated transfer of adaptation aftereffects between whole bodies and body parts. The present study investigated whether visual adaptation aftereffects transfer between hands and whole bodies in the context of adiposity judgements (i.e. how thin or fat a body is). On each trial, participants had to decide whether the body they saw was thinner or fatter than average. Participants performed the task before and after exposure to a thin/fat hand. Consistent with body adaptation studies, after exposure to a slim hand participants judged subsequently presented bodies to be fatter than after adaptation to a fat hand. These results suggest that there may be links between visual representations of body adiposity for whole bodies and body parts.

Adaptation to the Direction of Others' Gaze: A Review

The direction of another person’s gaze provides us with a strong cue to their intentions and future actions, and, correspondingly, the human visual system has evolved to extract information about others’ gaze from the sensory stream. The perception of gaze is a remarkably plastic process: adaptation to a particular direction of gaze over a matter of seconds or minutes can cause marked aftereffects in our sense of where other people are looking. In this review, we first discuss the measurement, specificity, and neural correlates of gaze aftereffects. We then examine how studies that have explored the perceptual and neural determinants of gaze aftereffects have provided key insights into the nature of how other people’s gaze direction is represented within the visual hierarchy. This includes the level of perceptual representation of gaze direction (e.g., relating to integrated vs. local facial features) and the interaction of this system with higher-level social-cognitive functions, such as theory of mind. Moreover, computational modeling of data from behavioral studies of gaze adaptation allows us to make inferences about the functional principles that govern the neural encoding of gaze direction. This in turn provides a foundation for testing computational theories of neuropsychiatric conditions in which gaze processing is compromised, such as autism.

The Effect of Head Orientation on Perceived Gaze Direction: Revisiting Gibson and Pick (1963) and Cline (1967)

Two biases in perceived gaze direction have been observed when eye and head orientation are not aligned. An overshoot effect indicates that perceived gaze direction is shifted away from head orientation (i.e., a repulsive effect), whereas a towing effect indicates that perceived gaze direction falls in between head and eye orientation (i.e., an attraction effect). In the 60s, three influential papers have been published with respect to the effect of head orientation on perceived gaze direction (Gibson and Pick, 1963; Cline, 1967; Anstis et al., 1969). Throughout the years, the results of two of these (Gibson and Pick, 1963; Cline, 1967) have been interpreted differently by a number of authors. In this paper, we critically discuss potential sources of confusion that have led to differential interpretations of both studies. At first sight, the results of Cline (1967), despite having been a major topic of discussion, unambiguously seem to indicate a towing effect whereas Gibson and Pick’s (1963) results seem to be the most ambiguous, although they have never been questioned in the literature. To shed further light on this apparent inconsistency, we repeated the critical experiments reported in both studies. Our results indicate an overshoot effect in both studies.

Point Me in the Right Direction: Same and Cross Category Visual Aftereffects to Directional Cues

Of the many hand gestures that we use in communication pointing is one of the most common and powerful in its role as a visual referent that directs joint attention. While numerous studies have examined the developmental trajectory of pointing production and comprehension, very little consideration has been given to adult visual perception of hand pointing gestures. Across two studies, we use a visual adaptation paradigm to explore the mechanisms underlying the perception of proto-declarative hand pointing. Twenty eight participants judged whether 3D modeled hands pointed, in depth, at or to the left or right of a target (test angles of 0°, 0.75° and 1.5° left and right) before and after adapting to either hands or arrows which pointed 10° to the right or left of the target. After adaptation, the perception of the pointing direction of the test hands shifted with respect to the adapted direction, revealing separate mechanisms for coding right and leftward pointing directions. While there were subtle yet significant differences in the strength of adaptation to hands and arrows, both cues gave rise to a similar pattern of aftereffects. The considerable cross category adaptation found when arrows were used as adapting stimuli and the asymmetry in aftereffects to left and right hands suggests that the adaptation aftereffects are likely driven by simple orientation cues, inherent in the morphological structure of the hand, and not dependent on the biological status of the hand pointing cue. This finding provides evidence in support of a common neural mechanism that processes these directional social cues, a mechanism that may be blind to the biological status of the stimulus category.