Electrophysiological correlates of social information processing for detecting agents in social interaction scenes: P200 and N250 components

摘要

According to interaction theories, the detection of situated agents and the understanding of their intentions and mental states are mediated by smart perceptual and embodied mechanisms. While the network supporting agency-attribution, action-understanding, and grasping of others' mental state is quite known, the actual mental chronometry of such social perception processes is still not clear. We then designed an exploratory study to investigate electrophysiological correlates (ERPs and source localization) of information-processing for the detection of potential agents in realistic interaction scenes. Morphological and statistical analyses of electrophysiological data highlighted that the manipulation the nature of a potential agent, the gesture it executed and the relative position of an interagent was differently associated to the modulation of specific relevant middle-latency ERP components, labelled as P200 and N250, and of their relative intra-cortical current density distribution within the first 300 ms from the appearance of the stimulus.