Social Perception ─ Detection and Interpretation of Animacy, Agency, and Intention

As we enter a room full of people, we instantly have a number of social perceptions.We have an automatic perception of others as subjective agents with their own points of view,thoughts, and goals, and we can quickly interpret minimal visual information to infer that somethingis animate. This book explores the perceptual and cognitive processes that allow humans to perceiveand understand this social information quickly and apparently effortlessly. Top researchers infields ranging from developmental psychology to vision science consider the perception of biologicaland animate motion, inferences based on this motion, and the early development of these abilities.

These innovative contributions reflect a recent renewal of interest in theattribution of agency and the understanding of goal-directed behavior, which has been accompanied bya rapid increase in empirical discoveries enabled by such new experimental techniques as brainimaging. The research presented in Social Perception suggests that an intuitiveunderstanding of others is an integral part of human psychology, develops early, relies on a networkof brain regions, and may be compromised inautism.

ContributorsDare Baldwin, Lara Bardi, H. Clark Barrett,Erin Cannon, You-jung Choi, Willem E. Frankenhuis, Tao Gao, Emily D. Grossman, Antonia Hamilton,Petra Hauf, Valerie A. Kuhlmeier, Jeff Loucks, Scott A. Love, Yuyan Luo, Elena Mascalzoni, PhilMcAleer, Richard Ramsey, Lucia Regolin, M. D. Rutherford, Kara Sage, Brian J. Scholl, MaggieShiffrar, Francesca Simion, Jessica Sommerville, James P. Thomas, Nikolaus Troje, AmandaWoodward

M.D. Rutherford is Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behavior at McMaster University, Ontario, and the author of Child Development: Perspectives in Developmental Psychology.