Abstract
Introduction: The ability to detect and interpret social interactions (SI) is one of the crucial skills enabling people to operate in the social world. Multiple lines of evidence converge to indicate the preferential processing of SI when compared to the individual actions of multiple agents, even if the actions were visually degraded to minimalistic point-light displays (PLDs). Here, we present a novel PLD dataset (Social Perception and Interaction Database; SoPID) that may be used for studying multiple levels of social information processing.Methods: During a motion-capture session, two pairs of actors were asked to perform a wide range of 3-second actions, including: (1) neutral, gesture-based communicative interactions (COM); (2) emotional exchanges (Happy/Angry); (3) synchronous interactive physical activity of actors (SYNC); and (4) independent actions of agents, either object-related (ORA) or non-object related (NORA). An interface that allows single/dyadic PLD stimuli to be presented from either the second person (action aimed toward the viewer) or third person (observation of actions presented toward other agents) perspective was implemented on the basis on the recorded actions. Two validation studies (each with 20 healthy individuals) were then performed to establish the recognizability of the SoPID vignettes.Results: The first study showed a ceiling level accuracy for discrimination of communicative vs. individual actions (93% ± 5%) and high accuracy for interpreting specific types of actions (85 ± 4%) from the SoPID. In the second study, a robust effect of scrambling on the recognizability of SoPID stimuli was observed in an independent sample of healthy individuals.Discussion: These results suggest that the SoPID may be effectively used to examine processes associated with communicative interactions and intentions processing. The database can be accessed via the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/dcht8/).
Highlights
The ability to detect and interpret social interactions (SI) is one of the crucial skills enabling people to operate in the social world
The present paper describes the Social Perception and Interaction Database, a novel set of point-light displays that enables study of the processing of a wide range of communicative and individual actions from single-agent and two-agent vignettes
By performing two validation studies, we established that SoPID vignettes elicit similar effects to those previously described in studies on intention and emotion processing from point-light displays (PLDs)
Summary
The ability to detect and interpret social interactions (SI) is one of the crucial skills enabling people to operate in the social world. The processing of social interactions elicits widespread activation of the main “social brain” networks, compared to the individual actions of multiple agents [8,9,10,11]. These effects may be observed for both naturalistic full displays of agents [12,13,14,15] and minimalistic point-light displays of social interactions [8, 10, 11, 16]. Point-light stimuli have been used to investigate communicative intentions processing from both single [21] and dyadic displays [3]
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