Cognitive Processes in the Perception of Actions and Agents

Abstract

Sensory input from the social world is often bustling and chaotic, and yet human beings typically comprehend events with ease. Evidence suggests that the perceptual system uses social cues to guide awareness to relevant actions, objects and spatial locations. In three studies, I demonstrate some of the cognitive processes involved in the perception of actions and agents. Chapter 1 tests the limitations of our ability to perceive ongoing activity, finding that event perception requires limited-capacity resources that tax encoding of properties when viewing two events in parallel. Chapter 2 explores the limits of a proposed system that rapidly calculates another’s perspective, revealing a heuristic signal that one’s visuospatial access to an attended set of objects may be privileged. Chapter 3 then tests whether social agents guide visual attention, finding a curious tendency to search regions of space unseen by another agent. Combined, these studies illustrate mechanisms that guide awareness in the real world.