Lec 9 (M2): The CEEing Model of Social Perception

What happened with the fighting triangles video at the start of class?

• Watched video of a large triangle, a small triangle, and a circle moving around while holding an 8-digit number

• Yet, almost everyone saw people: someone angry (typically big triangle), someone mean, someone scared

• Despite watching the same video, people saw different stories —> 50% two kids & a bully, 16% love triangle, 11% two parents & child

What does the video show about how confident we are in our own interpretation?

• After watching, ppl estimated what % of others saw the video the same way they did —> The 50% who saw two kids & bully answered 60%, the 16% who saw a love triangle answered 50%, the 11% who saw two parents w/child answered 52%, the handful who saw teenage couple & father answered 43.5%

• Conclusion: whatever we see, we assume the majority saw it the same way too, & we have no sense of how rare our own reading of an ambiguous situation is

• Our interpretation feels like reality & most people didn’t even think there was a second possible interpretation

• Hence, why we’re so divided as a country —> we look at things that can have various interpretations & assume only one can ever be drawn from them

Did you have to think your way to the story, & did the cognitive load matter?

• The majority said they simply saw the story

• holding a # in mind is a form of cognitive load, taking up some capacity used for logical thought

• nearly everyone successfully held the # and in previous years when class was divided into two groups (load vs no load) both groups’ ratings of the video were no different

• Meaning, understanding the triangles didn’t seem to depend on the capacity cognitive load takes up

Why can’t the three systems we’ve studied explain the triangles?

• The 3 systems: social perception system picks up on biological motion, facial expressions, & eye gaze —> mirror system codes for other’s actions & goals —> mentalizing system uses logical, propositional reasoning to work out other’s psychological states

• none of them fit the triangles b/c there’s no facial expressions, no eye gaze, no facial expressions. There’s no actions for mirror system as it’s tuned to primates’ body parts & doesn’t respond to pantomime or cartoons. Only the small handful who said they reasoned their way to the story, used the mentalizing system.

• none of these systems explain our understanding of the fighting triangles

What does the video of a man shoving another man add?

• In the video, two people argue & one pushes the other

• Social perception (like pSTS) picks up that two ppl are looking at each other & moving their mouths

• Mirror system pick up the action —> A is shoving B

• Mentalizing system may ask why A pushed B

• Like with the triangles, you simply see that A is angry and a little hostile. However, anger is a momentary state while hostility is a personality trait.

• Concluding someone is hostile based on one action, when there could be a good explanation for it, is the fundamental attribution error. In lab, around 90% of ppl would rate A as more hostile than average.

• Anger & hostility are INVISIBLE psychological states, yet is feels as though we can see them

How are illusory contours & pointing related to social seeing?

• Based on the image, most people see a white triangle sitting on top of a black one, but there’s no white triangle. Your brain adds it. Once yk that, you can see the triangle & know it’s not there at the same time.

• Anger is an invisible state in someone’s mind. You can see behavior & draw inferences. The question is whether you draw them through thinking or through something that feels like seeing. A lot of it feels like seeing.

• Similarly, when someone looks & points, our brains extend invisible lines from the eyes & the finger & look where they meet.

• Stanley Milgram had someone stand on NYC street looking & pointing up at a skyscraper, & lots of passerby looked up too. Yet, pointing is an abstract idea. Dogs & babies don’t follow pointing.

• We also see social facts at a glance w/o thinking required —> which ppl in a photo know each other, who’s in charge at a meeting, who feels threatened

What does “seeing” mean in this lecture?

• Typically seeing means light hitting retina & visual cortex analyzing the scene bit by bit. But we never experience the separate pixels. Instead we see a coherent scene full of meaning (ex: a lake w/ mountains in the background and trees in the front)

• Other experiences have the same quality w/o being purely visual —> you see a baby wants a toy even though wanting isn’t strictly visible. Or after a friend explains her view on the phone, you say “I see what you mean” despite not actually having something to look at

• The use of the verb “I see __” is found in more than 50 languages. Our language for intuitive understanding is overwhelmingly visual (ex: “taking the long view” “shedding light on a subject”).

• What these visual, psychological & semantic kinds of seeing share is that complex inputs effortlessly collapse into a single coherent interpretation. That’s the meaning of seeing in this lec.

What is the CEEing model?

• It’s an account for pre-reflective subjective construal

• pre-reflective —> the parts of experience that occur before or w/o thought (like understanding the fighting triangles)

• subjective construal —> your understanding of what’s happening in a particular moment or situation (ex: some may construe this is an awesome lecture while others think it’s a confusing one)

• CEEing is an acronym for the qualities of these experiences —> they are coherent, effortless experiences, & they have intuitive givenness

• Givenness —> philosophy term for the quality of an experience such that the question of whether it’s true, or partly built by your own mind, never comes up. (A math equation isn’t given, you’d have to work it out)

• Reality (including social reality) feels given, even though your brain adds a great deal to what reaches your eyes & ears

What would a brain system for CEEing need to do?

• 1) it would have to be fast —> there was no delay in seeing what the triangles were up to & seeing a shove happens in the same milliseconds as seeing it as an angry shove

• 2) it would have to be effortless —>

• 3) it would have to be integrative —> a social moment involves faces, voices, words, the physical setting, your expectations & motivations. CEEing collapses all of that into one coherent conscious experience.

• So, the system has to bring many separate processing streams together quickly which is hard

How do computer chips help explain the brain systems involved? (not on exam)

• lateral PFC, working memory, & propositional reasoning region —> like CPU chips which do one instruction at a time & are extremely flexible but not very fast

• early visual cortex (EVC) —> like GPU chips which are incredibly fast but each part handles its own piece & ignores what the others are doing. EVC is retinotopic which gets lots of info from eyes via thalamus, splits it up by location in the vision field, keeping pieces separate for several stages. It’s fast but not integrative.

• Gestalt Cortex —> like TPU chips which take multiple input streams, combine them into one operation, & produce an output shaped by all of them. Both fast and integrative.

What is Gestalt Cortex?

• broad region professor thinks of as brain’s coherence engine

• includes pSTS, FFA, rostral inferior parietal lobule (rIPL), & possible the intraparietal sulcus, TPJ

• TPJ is the star of Gestalt Cortex —> effortless & integrative unlike dmPFC, which we once thought were interchangeable but actually do different things

How do we know TPJ is faster than dmPFC?