Social cognition is at the core of human intelligence. It is through social interactions that we learn. We believe that social interactions drove much of the evolution of the human brain. Indeed, the neural machinery of social cognition comprises a substantial proportion of the brain. The greatest feats of the human intellect are often the product not of individual brains, but people working together in social groups. Thus, intelligence simply cannot be understood without understanding social cognition. Yet we have no theory or even taxonomy of social intelligence, and little understanding of the underlying brain mechanisms, their development, or the computations they perform. Here we bring developmental, computational, and cognitive neuroscience approaches to bear on a newly tractable component of social intelligence: nonverbal social perception (NVSP), which is the ability to discern rich multidimensional social information from a few seconds of a silent video.
Face Looking Behavior and Image Statistics in the Real World
What are the statistical properties of the faces our visual system encounters in everyday life? Which of these properties does the brain use to decide where and when we look in social contexts? Almost all work on how we look at and recognize faces has been done in the inherently non-social environment of the lab. Here, we use state-of-the-art mobile eye tracking and video technology to ascertain how and why people look at faces in real world environments.
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