Seeing social interactions: a dynamical systems perspective

Perceiving and understanding social interactions is critical for a range of everyday human activities. In their recent review, McMahon and Isik propose that social interactions are seen rather than recognised, supported by low-level and largely automatic visual processes in the human brain rather than higher-level social cognitive processes. They argued that the human visual system not only has the capacity to process individual person properties but also higher-level between-person interactional properties. Here we extend this view by providing evidence from the interpersonal coordination literature that social interactions can be understood as complex dynamical systems whose underlying interactional properties are perceived via low-dimensional spatiotemporal information directly detected by the visual system.