The Science of Social Vision: The Science of Social Vision
Published on 25. November 2010
Book
Hardback
504 pages
978-0-19-533317-6 (ISBN)
Description
The human visual system is particularly attuned to and remarkably efficient at processing social cues. We can effectively "read" others' mental and emotional states and make snap judgments about their characters and dispositions, simply by watching them. Given what is clearly a close relationship between vision and social interaction, it has become increasingly clear to social psychologists seeking to better understand the functional and neuroanatomical mechanisms underlying social perception that vision plays a critical role in the development and maintenance of social exchange. Likewise, vision scientists have come to appreciate the profound impact people, as social agents, have had on the visual system, acknowledging just how important it is to consider the socially adaptive functions that system evolved to perform.
The Science of Social Vision explores the biologically determined to the culturally shaped influences on social vision. Four themes emerge throughout the 25 chapters from leaders in the field. These include:
1) Visually mediated attention moderates complex social interactions and plays a critical role in the development of social cognition;
2) Visual features perceptually determine categorical thinking and have profound downstream consequences including stereotype activation;
3) Perceptual experiences can be directly triggered by visual cues, in which case, visual and social perception are essentially equivalent processes;
4) Social factors exert powerful top-down influences on even low-level visual perception, at some times biasing, while at others fine-tuning perceptual acuity.
This book heralds the new field of social vision, and showcases the cutting edge and broadly interdisciplinary research that is currently at its forefront. Together the perspectives drawn from these various fields offer unique insight into the origin, adaptive purpose, and cognitive, cultural, and biological underpinnings of social vision that will help to shape and guide the way we think about and examine social visual perception. The Science of Social Vision will provide a valuable resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including cognitive, developmental, and social psychology, vision science, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and ethology.
The Science of Social Vision explores the biologically determined to the culturally shaped influences on social vision. Four themes emerge throughout the 25 chapters from leaders in the field. These include:
1) Visually mediated attention moderates complex social interactions and plays a critical role in the development of social cognition;
2) Visual features perceptually determine categorical thinking and have profound downstream consequences including stereotype activation;
3) Perceptual experiences can be directly triggered by visual cues, in which case, visual and social perception are essentially equivalent processes;
4) Social factors exert powerful top-down influences on even low-level visual perception, at some times biasing, while at others fine-tuning perceptual acuity.
This book heralds the new field of social vision, and showcases the cutting edge and broadly interdisciplinary research that is currently at its forefront. Together the perspectives drawn from these various fields offer unique insight into the origin, adaptive purpose, and cognitive, cultural, and biological underpinnings of social vision that will help to shape and guide the way we think about and examine social visual perception. The Science of Social Vision will provide a valuable resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including cognitive, developmental, and social psychology, vision science, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and ethology.
Reviews / Votes
"Social psychology has always been a vibrant area addressing questions of everyday importance: prejudice, friendship, love, and hate. The vitality of the field has now recruited vision scientists and their methods for novel and insightful interactions between vision science and social psychology. Across these chapters we see numerous examples of unexpected interactions: rapid influences of very low-level visual properties (for example, facial coloring, Chapters10 and16) on our social judgments and direct modification of perception by social variables (for example, biological motion, Chapters 14 and 15). These are exciting new directions in both social
psychology and vision sciences, and this book offers the first road map of this new overlapping area, much of it focused on face perception. I recommend it highly for upper division undergraduate courses, graduate seminars, and as a reference resource for specialists." --Patrick Cavanagh, Universite Paris Descartes
"An exciting and important book. It does what only the best anthologies can do: disparate streams of ongoing investigation are placed in a new context that allows a whole host of new research problems to come into focus. I recommend this book to cognitive scientists of all stripes (whether neuroscientists, vision researchers, social psychologists, or philosophers). I wouldn't be surprised if we later look back on the publication of The Science of Social Vision
as a landmark in the history of cognitive science." --Alva Noe, University of California, Berkeley
"Readers of this book will be witnessing the arrival of a new interdisciplinary field of scientific inquiry: the science of social vision. In his brilliant introductory chapter, Ken Nakayama defines that field, traces its historical roots, and places in into an evolutionary context. It is hard to imagine a biological or behavioral scientist who would not profit from a careful reading of this book." --Robert Rosenthal, University of California, Riverside
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
41 Color Halftones, 42 BW Halftones, 11 Color Line Drawings, 39 BW Line Drawings
Dimensions
Height: 183 mm
Width: 257 mm
Thickness: 38 mm
Weight
1446 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-533317-6 (9780195333176)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Dr. Reginald B. Adams, Jr., Assistant Professor at The Pennsylvania State University, received his Ph.D. in experimental social psychology from Dartmouth College. Before coming to Penn State, he was awarded a National Research Service Award (NRSA) from the National Institute of Mental Health to train as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and Tufts Universities. His current research focuses on how multiply perceived nonverbal messages (e.g., emotion, gender, race, and age) combine and interact to form the unified social representations that guide our impressions of and responses to others.
Dr. Nalini Ambady, Professor and Neubauer Faculty Fellow at Tufts University, received her Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University and taught at Holy Cross College and Harvard University, where she was the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Science, before moving to Tufts. She has received several awards for her research including the Presidential Early Career Award for
Scientists and Engineers and the AAAS Behavioral Science Research Prize. Her research interests focus on the accuracy of social, emotional, and perceptual judgments, how personal and social identities affect cognition and performance, nonverbal and cross-cultural communication.
Dr. Ken Nakayama, Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, received his Ph.D. in physiological psychology from UCLA. After a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley and two years teaching in the Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, he spent much of his career at the Smith Kettlewell Eye Institute in San Francisco before moving to Harvard in 1990. He has been interested in almost all aspects of vision, from the processing of image features to social perception.
Dr. Shinsuke Shimojo, Professor in Biology, and Computation and Neural Systems at California Institute of Technology, received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from MIT. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the
Smith-Kettlewell Eye Institute in Sa Francisco, he moved to the University of Tokyo as an associate professor (in 1989), and then took his current position at Caltech. His work has covered a wide range of topics, such as vision, visual development, sensory-motor coordination, crossmodal integration, emotion and implicit aspects of decision making.
Dr. Nalini Ambady, Professor and Neubauer Faculty Fellow at Tufts University, received her Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University and taught at Holy Cross College and Harvard University, where she was the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Science, before moving to Tufts. She has received several awards for her research including the Presidential Early Career Award for
Scientists and Engineers and the AAAS Behavioral Science Research Prize. Her research interests focus on the accuracy of social, emotional, and perceptual judgments, how personal and social identities affect cognition and performance, nonverbal and cross-cultural communication.
Dr. Ken Nakayama, Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, received his Ph.D. in physiological psychology from UCLA. After a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley and two years teaching in the Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, he spent much of his career at the Smith Kettlewell Eye Institute in San Francisco before moving to Harvard in 1990. He has been interested in almost all aspects of vision, from the processing of image features to social perception.
Dr. Shinsuke Shimojo, Professor in Biology, and Computation and Neural Systems at California Institute of Technology, received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from MIT. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the
Smith-Kettlewell Eye Institute in Sa Francisco, he moved to the University of Tokyo as an associate professor (in 1989), and then took his current position at Caltech. His work has covered a wide range of topics, such as vision, visual development, sensory-motor coordination, crossmodal integration, emotion and implicit aspects of decision making.
Editor
Assistant Professor of PsychologyAssistant Professor of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
Professor of PsychologyProfessor of Psychology, Tufts University, Boston, MA
Edgar Pierce Professor of PsychologyEdgar Pierce Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Professor of BiologyProfessor of Biology, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA
Content
Introduction
Adams, Ambady, Nakayama, and Shimojo
Chapter 1 An Ecological Theory of Face Perception
Zebrowitz, Bronstad, and Montepare
Chapter 2 The Cognitive Capitalist: The Social Benefits of Perceptual Economy
Martin and Macrae
Chapter 3 Faces, bodies, social vision as agent vision and social consciousness
de Gelder and Tamietto
Chapter 4 Perceiving Through Culture: The Socialized Attention Hypothesis
Park and Kitayama
Chapter 5 Compound Social Cues in Human Face Processing
Adams, Franklin, Nelson, and Stevenson
Chapter 6 Gaze Perception and Visually Mediated Attention
Langton
Chapter 7 Aging Eyes Facing an Emotional World: The Role of Motivated Gaze
Isaacowitz and Murphy
Chapter 8 Gaze and preference - orienting behavior as a somatic precursor of preference decision
Shimojo, Simion, and Changizi
Chapter 9 Facial Attractiveness
Little and Perrett
Chapter 10 Why Cosmetics Work
Russell
Chapter 11 Context-specific Responses to Self-Resembling Faces
DeBruine and Jones
Chapter 12 In the eyes of the beholder: How empathy influences emotion perception
Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen
Chapter 13 Thin-Slice Vision
Weisbuch and Ambady
Chapter 14 Seeing human movement as inherently social
Shiffrar, Kaiser, and Chouchourelou
Chapter 15 Social Constraints on the Visual Perception of Biological Motion
Johnson, Pollick, and McKay
Chapter 16 Social Color Vision
Changizi and Shimojo
Chapter 17 Mental Control and Visual Illusions: Errors of Action and Construal in Race-based Weapon Misidentification
Stokes and Payne
Chapter 18 Afrocentric Facial Features and Stereotyping
Blair and Judd
Chapter 19 The Role of Racial Markers in Race Perception and Racial Categorization
O.H. MacLin & M.K. MacLin
Chapter 20 Aftereffects reveal that adaptive face-coding mechanisms are selective for race and sex
Rhodes and Jaquet
Chapter 21 Are people special? A brain's eye view
Atkinson, Heberlein, and Adolphs
Chapter 22 Side Bias: Cerebral Hemispheric Asymmetry In Social Cognition And Emotion Perception
Savage, Borod, and Ramig
Chapter 23 Biological Motion and Multisensory Integration: The Role of the Superior Temporal Sulcus
Beauchamp
Chapter 24 Specialized Brain for the Social Vision: Perspectives from Typical and Atypical Development
Farroni and Senju
Adams, Ambady, Nakayama, and Shimojo
Chapter 1 An Ecological Theory of Face Perception
Zebrowitz, Bronstad, and Montepare
Chapter 2 The Cognitive Capitalist: The Social Benefits of Perceptual Economy
Martin and Macrae
Chapter 3 Faces, bodies, social vision as agent vision and social consciousness
de Gelder and Tamietto
Chapter 4 Perceiving Through Culture: The Socialized Attention Hypothesis
Park and Kitayama
Chapter 5 Compound Social Cues in Human Face Processing
Adams, Franklin, Nelson, and Stevenson
Chapter 6 Gaze Perception and Visually Mediated Attention
Langton
Chapter 7 Aging Eyes Facing an Emotional World: The Role of Motivated Gaze
Isaacowitz and Murphy
Chapter 8 Gaze and preference - orienting behavior as a somatic precursor of preference decision
Shimojo, Simion, and Changizi
Chapter 9 Facial Attractiveness
Little and Perrett
Chapter 10 Why Cosmetics Work
Russell
Chapter 11 Context-specific Responses to Self-Resembling Faces
DeBruine and Jones
Chapter 12 In the eyes of the beholder: How empathy influences emotion perception
Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen
Chapter 13 Thin-Slice Vision
Weisbuch and Ambady
Chapter 14 Seeing human movement as inherently social
Shiffrar, Kaiser, and Chouchourelou
Chapter 15 Social Constraints on the Visual Perception of Biological Motion
Johnson, Pollick, and McKay
Chapter 16 Social Color Vision
Changizi and Shimojo
Chapter 17 Mental Control and Visual Illusions: Errors of Action and Construal in Race-based Weapon Misidentification
Stokes and Payne
Chapter 18 Afrocentric Facial Features and Stereotyping
Blair and Judd
Chapter 19 The Role of Racial Markers in Race Perception and Racial Categorization
O.H. MacLin & M.K. MacLin
Chapter 20 Aftereffects reveal that adaptive face-coding mechanisms are selective for race and sex
Rhodes and Jaquet
Chapter 21 Are people special? A brain's eye view
Atkinson, Heberlein, and Adolphs
Chapter 22 Side Bias: Cerebral Hemispheric Asymmetry In Social Cognition And Emotion Perception
Savage, Borod, and Ramig
Chapter 23 Biological Motion and Multisensory Integration: The Role of the Superior Temporal Sulcus
Beauchamp
Chapter 24 Specialized Brain for the Social Vision: Perspectives from Typical and Atypical Development
Farroni and Senju