Toward first-person social perception: actively engaging in an interaction boosts sensitivity to social information

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Qi Liang¹ (qi.liang@dartmouth.edu), Zishan Su¹, Rekha Varrier^1,2, Eshin Jolly^1,3, Emily Finn¹; ¹Dartmouth College, ²University of Bonn, ³University of California San Diego

Humans are adept at processing social information and understanding interactions not only between others (third-person perspective), but also—and more importantly—between themselves and others (first-person perspective). Previous work has mostly focused on the former, leaving first-person scenarios under-explored. In this study (n=288), we created simple visual scenes with varying levels of evidence for a social interaction by creating scenes with one dot programmed to chase another dot to a more or less obvious degree (“chase directness”). We presented these in two conditions for 48 trials each to address possible differences between perspectives. Participants either watched two moving dots for 6s (third-person) or controlled one dot with a mouse and explored the scene for 6s (first-person). Afterwards, they chose whether one dot was chasing the other dot (third-person) or the dot they controlled (first-person) and reported their confidence. We then quantified each participant's sensitivity to social information in both conditions by fitting their responses with a psychometric function of chase directness and comparing curve parameters between conditions. Results showed that participants' ​point of subjective equality (how direct a chase needed to be for someone to switch their perception from non-social to social) was significantly smaller in the first-person condition, suggesting that actively engaging in interactions boosts sensitivity to social information. Furthermore, participants were more confident in the first-person condition, especially when the presence or absence of interactions was obvious. Findings highlight the importance of studying first-person social perception and introduce a quantitative approach to capture the differences between perspectives.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Other