Abstract：As inherently social beings, humans navigate a complex environment where the accurate recognition of social information—such as others’ behaviors, intentions, and emotions—is vital for survival and development. The visual system is capable of extracting individual-level social information including attributes like animacy and personality, as well as more complex interpersonal social relationship information such as cooperation, competition, chasing, and protection, from the motion of simple geometric shapes.
Simple moving objects convey both physical and kinematic information. On one hand, the visual system organizes perceptual input based on physical features according to Gestalt principles of similarity (e.g., color and shape similarity), thereby grouping similar objects together. On the other hand, the visual system can automatically extract social relationship information directly from motion patterns, effectively achieving perceptual organization based on social relationship information (e.g., grouping objects in cooperative relationships). However, conflicts may arise between organizations based on physical features and that based on social relationship information; specifically, object similarity may modulate the extraction of social relational information. The present study primarily addresses this issue.
We employed a dynamic chasing paradigm consisting of two chasers (predators) and one target (prey). The object similarity between chasers (identical vs. different appearance) and the type of motion trajectory (cooperative chasing vs. competitive chasing vs. random motion) were manipulated as independent variables. Participants were required to evaluate the perceived social relationship between the two chasers, where higher scores indicated a stronger perception of cooperation, while lower scores indicated a stronger perception of competition. Experiment 1 verified whether participants could accurately identify cooperative and competitive relationships from the motion of simple objects. Experiment 2 investigated how object similarity between chasers influenced observers’ perception of cooperative and competitive relationships. Experiment 3 confirmed the robustness of the findings in experiment 2 by eliminating a potential confounding factor: the shared appearance between one chaser and the target.
Results indicated that participants effectively distinguished social relationships. Evaluation scores for cooperative relationships were significantly above zero, whereas scores for competitive relationships were significantly below zero (Experiment 1). Crucially, when chasers are in cooperative relationship, evaluation scores were higher for chasers with identical appearances compared to those with different appearances. Conversely, no significant difference was found in the evaluation of competitive relationships based on appearance similarity. This pattern persisted even after controlling physical feature confounds between the chasers and the target (Experiment 3).
These findings suggest that while observers can effectively perceive social relationship information from the motion of simple objects, visual similarity modulates this process asymmetrically. Compared to chasers with different appearances, observers perceive stronger cooperative relationships between chasers with identical appearances. By contrast, there is no difference in perceived competitive intensity between the identical and different appearances.
The present study offers novel evidence regarding how object similarity influences social relationship information, providing a new perspective on advancing the understanding of the visual information interaction principles between Gestalt organization and social organization in cognitive processing. The principle of object similarity provides a theoretical basis for enhancing human’s understanding of behaviors and intentions among multiple agents, as well as for constructing efficient and ecological human-machine symbiotic environments.
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