Gender powers perception of “dancing circles in love”

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Abstract
Humans tend to attribute social characteristics to moving geometric shapes as if they were animate beings (eg, kissing each other while dancing). This ability is considered an integral component of day-to-day life and a fundamental key to navigating effective social communication. The Heider-and-Simmel (HS)-like paradigm is suitable for investigating mechanisms of social attribution across lifespans and population groups, particularly in clinical contexts. As vast majority of mental and neurodevelopmental disorders are gender-specific, the present study delves into possible gender impacts on inferring social interaction in HS-like movies. The outcome indicates that typically developing females and males do not differ in recognition accuracy and processing speed of social interaction in HS-like animations, though males take longer and tend to be less accurate in recognition of similar control movies, more often mistaking them for social interaction. The signal detection analysis shows that females tend to be more tuned to social interaction (in terms of sensitivity index, d′) without gender difference in response bias (decision criterion c). In both genders, decision criteria are liberal (c < 0), pointing to a tendency to anthropomorphize control animations. The outcome sheds light on the nature of gender impact on perception of interaction as well as on neural underpinnings of social attribution in the gendered brain.
Funding Information
  • European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (101156763)
  • Doctoral Program of Interdisciplinary Center for Clinical Research
  • University of Tübingen Medical School

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