Social-affective features drive human representations of observed actions
- Johns Hopkins University, United States
Abstract
Humans observe actions performed by others in many different visual and social settings. What features do we extract and attend when we view such complex scenes, and how are they processed in the brain? To answer these questions, we curated two large-scale sets of naturalistic videos of everyday actions and estimated their perceived similarity in two behavioral experiments. We normed and quantified a large range of visual, action-related and social-affective features across the stimulus sets. Using a cross-validated variance partitioning analysis, we found that social-affective features predicted similarity judgments better than, and independently of, visual and action features in both behavioral experiments. Next, we conducted an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment, which revealed a sustained correlation between neural responses to videos and their behavioral similarity. Visual, action, and social-affective features predicted neural patterns at early, intermediate and late stages respectively during this behaviorally relevant time window. Together, these findings show that social-affective features are important for perceiving naturalistic actions, and are extracted at the final stage of a temporal gradient in the brain.
Data availability
Behavioral and EEG data and results have been archived as an Open Science Framework repository (https://osf.io/hrmxn/). Analysis code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/dianadima/mot_action).
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Social-affective features drive human representations of observed actionsOpen Science Framework, https://osf.io/hrmxn/.
Article and author information
Author details
Christopher J Honey
Funding
National Science Foundation (CCF-1231216)
- Leyla Isik
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All procedures for data collection were approved by the Johns Hopkins University Institutional Review Board, with protocol numbers HIRB00009730 for the behavioral experiments and HIRB00009835 for the EEG experiment. Informed consent was obtained from all participants.
Copyright
© 2022, Dima et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Social-affective features drive human representations of observed actions
eLife 11:e75027.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.75027
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.
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- Neuroscience
When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
