Abstract
Humans rapidly extract diverse and complex information from ongoing social interactions, but the perceptual and neural organization of the different aspects of social perception remains unresolved. We showed short film clips with rich social content to 97 healthy participants while their haemodynamic brain activity was measured with fMRI. The clips were annotated moment-to-moment for 112 social features. Cluster analysis revealed that 13 dimensions were sufficient for describing the social perceptual space. Univariate GLM was used to map regional neural response profiles to different social features. Multivariate pattern analysis was then utilized to establish the spatial specificity of the responses. The results revealed a posterior-anterior gradient in the processing of social information in the brain. Occipital and temporal regions responded to most social dimensions and the classifier revealed that these responses were dimension-specific; in contrast Heschl gyri and parietal areas were also broadly tuned to different social signals while the responses were domain-general and did not differentiate between dimensions. Frontal and limbic regions responded only to a limited number of social dimensions. Altogether these results highlight the distributed nature of social processing in the brain as well as the posterior-anterior gradient of domain-general versus dimension-specific social perceptual processes in the brain.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Possible confounding low-level audiovisual features have been more strictly controlled than in the first version of the manuscript.