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Category: Project

Description: Humans have a long-standing evolutionary history of group belonging. As such, our visual system should be tuned to efficiently detect the presence of social groups, especially those in interactive or “core configurations”, i.e. when individual members are facing each other. Past work has shown that two individuals are detected more efficiently when the individuals are facing toward (vs. away from) each other. Here we examine whether such “facing advantage” arises not just from dyads, but also from small social groups of three, or triads. In three preregistered experiments, participants searched for a facing group (among non-facing ones) or for a non-facing group (among facing ones). Facing groups were located faster than non-facing ones, demonstrating a perceptual advantage for groups in core configurations (Experiment 1). Interestingly, this advantage diminished as the number of groups in the displays increased, suggesting that the prioritization of core group configurations may be less effective in larger crowds. Facing groups were also detected more quickly in unfamiliar viewing conditions when the search displays were inverted, indicating a role for visual cues of body orientation in core configurations (Experiments 2 and 3). Together, these results suggest that human perception is well-tuned to detect core social group configurations, representing not just prototypical dyadic interactions, but interactive configurations more generally, and allowing for efficient visual representation and processing of complex social information.