Encapsulation of the Visual Perception of Social Events from Semantic Priming

Social event cognition draws on both higher level semantic processes and lower level mechanisms in visual perception. However, the interaction between these levels has not yet been precisely characterized. The present article investigates whether the visual perception of social events is encapsulated from the direct, top-down influence of semantic information. To test this, we leverage a phenomenon reflecting the visual perception of social relations: the two-body inversion effect. Across a series of experiments conducted on French-speaking participants (N = 373), we identified a novel semantic priming effect: Verbs (as opposed to nouns) selectively enhance responses to socially relevant stimuli. However, the two-body inversion effect itself was not influenced by this priming effect, suggesting that the visual perception of social events is encapsulated from higher level semantic processes.