Visual perception grounding of social cognition in preverbal infants

Abstract Social life is inherently relational, entailing the ability to recognize and monitor social entities and the relationships between them. Very young infants privilege socially relevant entities in the visual world, such as faces and bodies. Here, we show that six‐month‐old infants also discriminate between configurations of multiple human bodies, based on the internal visuo‐spatial relations between bodies, which could cue—or not—social interaction. We measured the differential looking times for two images, each featuring two identical bodies, but in different spatial relations. Infants discriminated between face‐to‐face and back‐to‐back body dyads (Experiment 1), and treated face‐to‐face dyads with higher efficiency (i.e., processing speed), relative to back‐to‐back dyads (Experiment 2). Looking times for dyads in an asymmetrical relation (i.e., one body facing another without reciprocation) were comparable to looking times for face‐to‐face dyads, and differed from looking times to back‐to‐back dyads, suggesting general discrimination between the presence versus absence of relation (Experiment 3). Infants’ discrimination of images based on relative positioning of items did not generalize to body‐object pairs (Experiment 4). Early sensitivity to the relative positioning of bodies in a scene may be a building block of social cognition, preparing the discovery of the keel and backbone of social life: relations.