Faces, Bodies, Social Vision as Agent vision and social consciousness

This chapter discusses recent findings from our own research on face and body perception with special attention to the implications of the findings for social vision. The first section is devoted to similarities between the processes underlying face and body perception. In the second section we discuss how the perception of faces and bodies is integrated. The third section tackles issues on conscious and nonconscious perception of socially meaningful signals and their neuroanatomical underpinnings. Finally, the relation between social vision and awareness is explored and notion of social consciousness is developed.