[visionlist] Call for papers - Frontiers Research Topic "Neural Mechanisms of Social Vision"

[Jacob Jolij]

--- Apologies for cross-posting! ---

Dear all,

Please find attached a call for papers for a special issue of Frontiers 
in Integrative Neuroscience I will be hosting, on the neural mechanisms 
of social vision. Feel free to forward this call to colleagues who may 
be interested!

Best wishes,

Jacob Jolij

CALL FOR PAPERS --

FRONTIERS RESEARCH TOPIC ON THE NEURAL MECHANISMS OF SOCIAL VISION

Hosted by Jacob Jolij (Univerisity of Groningen), Ron Dotsch (Princeton 
University), and Yana Heussen (University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein)

Humans are social beings: interacting with each other is critical for 
our survival. However, successful social interaction requires that we 
understand each other's actions and intentions. To this end, it is 
crucial that we can interpret social signals accurately. In the animal 
kingdom, there are numerous examples of the co-evolution of social 
signalling on the one hand, and sensory systems on the other hand. 
Indeed, in the recent literature there are numerous reports that the 
human visual system is particularly sensitive to social cues - for 
example facial emotional expressions and body language. There are 
numerous reports of the brain's ability to process facial expressions 
and emotional body language without attention and awareness. To some 
extent, there may even be dedicated brain areas to process social 
signals, such as the fusiform face area, or the so-called social brain 
network. However, some recent findings suggest that some aspects of 
social perception may have their grounds in older, non-social brain 
networks: perception of social distance, for example, is mediated by the 
same cortical areas as spatial distance. There is even evidence that 
social-affective information may bias processing throughout the entire 
visual system: an observer's mood, but even his or her religion may have 
a profound effect on the way that observer perceives the world. Happy 
people see happy faces better than sad people, and vice versa, and 
Calvinist Christians are more sensitive to overall gist of visual scenes 
than atheïsts.

All in all, it is clear that visual processing and social cognition may 
be much closer related that previously thought. The emerging field that 
studies this interaction is called social vision, and brings together 
scholars from sociology, social, evolutionary, clinical, and cognitive 
psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and neurophysiology. However, with 
such a broad field it is difficult to keep track of findings in all of 
these areas, all of which may be relevant to one's work. Because of 
this, the field may miss out on an integrative perspective on social 
vision. How does the brain integrate social information into visual 
processing? To what extent do 'normal' and 'social' visual processing 
overlap? And may the social-cognitive deficits associated with 
conditions as schizophrenia and autism perhaps be explained by the 
perceptual deficits that accompany these disorders as well?

The goal of this Frontiers Research Topic is to provide a forum for 
researchers in social vision, with an emphasis on the neural mechanisms 
of social vision. We invite researchers in the field to contribute 
review papers and original research to give a broad overview of the 
field, from social psychology to neurophysiology. Our aim is to have a 
Research Topic that allows researchers to discover new literature, meet 
new colleagues, and to engage in discussions, and, who knows, 
collaborations, to advance social vision to a truly integrated 
interdisciplinary field.

If you are interested in contributing to this research topic, please 
send an abstract to Dr Jacob Jolij (j.jolij at rug.nl 
<mailto:j.jolij at rug.nl>), no later than October 3rd. Full submissions 
due November 28th.

Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience is a Swiss-based, open access 
journal publishing high quality research in integrative neuroscience. 
All contributions will be peer-reviewed, and evaluated within Frontier's 
open evaluation and tier-system. Please note that publication fees for 
papers in a Research Topic are reduced (EUR 900 instead of EUR 1200). 
For more information, please consult http://www.frontiersin.org.


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