Social Perception and Interaction Database - a novel tool to study social cognitive processes with point-light displays.

Abstract

IntroductionThe ability to detect and interpret third-party encounters (TPE) is one of the crucial skills enabling people to operate in the social world. Multiple lines of evidence converge towards the preferential processing of TPE when compared to the individual actions of multiple agents, even if the actions of agents were visually degraded to minimalistic point-light displays (PLDs). Here, we present a novel PLD dataset (Social Perception and Interaction Database; SoPID) that may be used for studying multiple levels of social information processing.\n\nMethodsDuring a motion-capture session, two pairs of actors were asked to perform a wide range of dyadic 3-second actions, including: (1) neutral, gesture-based communicative interactions (COM); (2) emotional exchanges (Happy/Angry); (3) synchronous physical activity of actors (SYNC); and (4) independent actions of agents, either object-related (ORA) or non-object related (NORA). The stimuli were then transformed into PLDs. Two validation studies (each with 20 healthy individuals) were then performed to establish the recognizability of the SoPID vignettes.\n\nResultsThe first study showed a ceiling level accuracy for discrimination of communicative vs. individual actions (93% +/- 5%) and high accuracy for interpreting specific types of actions (85 +/- 4%) from the SoPID. In the second study, a robust effect of scrambling on the recognizability of SoPID vignettes was observed in an independent sample of healthy individuals.\n\nDiscussionThese results suggest that the SoPID may be effectively used to examine processes associated with communicative interactions and intentions processing. The database can be accessed via Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/dcht8/).