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A social interaction field model accurately identifies static and dynamic social groupings

  • 2019.11.19
  • Event
"Identifying people who gather in a crowd is an essential cognitive function of our social lives. To achieve that, our brain needs to identify the interactions between individuals and integrate them into groups. Previous studies have mainly focused on the perceptual grouping of low-level visual features. However, very little attention has been paid to grouping in a social scene. In this study, we implemented cutting-edge virtual reality technology whereby we could manipulate characteristics of avatars in virtual scenes in a quantitative way. We conducted sophisticated psychophysical experiments to investigate the effect of interpersonal distance and angle on the judgments of social groups. Based on that, we deduced a space where people interact with each other and developed a social grouping field model (SGFM). The model was further verified by an experiment using multiple avatars in complex virtual spaces that could well predict human participants’ judgments in real social scenes that the conceptualized proxemic theory and conventional perceptual association grouping model failed to achieve. Our findings indicate an efficient computational framework in analyzing social interactions, which provides insight into how our brain organizes and interprets social information, enabling identification of social groups.

Topic:A social interaction field model accurately identifies static and dynamic social groupings

Date:November 19th, 2019, Tuesday

Time: 17:00-18:00

Venue: Room 201, Teaching A 

Speaker: Prof. Kuai Shuguang   

About the Speaker: Prof. Kuai received his bachelor degree of science in psychology from East China Normal University in 2004 and received PHD of neuroscience from Chinese Academy of Science in 2009. He received postdoctoral training at School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK from 2009 to 2012. From 2012 to 2015, Dr. Kuai worked for Philips Research as a Senior Research Scientist. He joined East China Normal University as a faculty member in 2015. He is now the Head and Principal Investigator of Visual Cognition and Virtual Reality Application Lab in ECNU. His lab mainly uses virtual reality to study human perception of social environment.