![]() ![]() This requires new types of experimental designs and paradigms, new technologies to capture data and create stimuli, and new analytic methods, all of which are now emerging. We must move beyond stimuli reduced to individual words or individual faces, heard or seen in isolation and out of context, to studying real people or animals showing natural behaviours in interaction, including the deeply multi-modal nature of face-to-face interaction and their core role in coordinating it. However, there are also substantial challenges involved in building an experimentally grounded science of face-to-face interaction. This is expressed as an increased focus on second-person neuroscience. While studying social interaction has been the very focus of enquiry in conversation analysis since its emergence in the 1970s, results like these have led to the importance of ecological validity and natural behaviour increasingly being recognized also in the cognitive and neurosciences. An increasing number of studies show that people perform differently when being watched by a real person, when socially co-present and engaged in joint action or taking part in a dynamic conversation. In addition to understanding face-to-face interaction being important because it is a fundamental human capacity, one of the strongest arguments for studying it directly comes from findings which show that behaviour, brain processes and cognition operate differently when people are in an interaction with another person. In this introductory paper, we will set out the principles of why face-to-face interaction matters and the overall frameworks within which we can take a scientific approach to this complex topic. ![]() These techniques can be applied to typical adults, to child development, to atypical populations and to non-human species in order to understand the core principles of face-to-face interaction and their diversity in different settings. The papers included here showcase new types of experimental designs and paradigms, including novel technologies to capture data and create stimuli, and they break new ground in terms of analytic methods. In this special issue, we bring together papers from a wide variety of approaches to the study of face-to-face interaction, from animal behaviour to linguistics and from computational models to infant development. However, face-to-face interaction is challenging to study because natural human (or animal) behaviour is hard to pin down in the laboratory and manipulate experimentally. ![]() autism and schizophrenia) and to create the next generation of artificial agents which can communicate with people (going beyond Amazon Alexa). It is important because it will allow us to understand some of the basic behavioural, cognitive and neurocognitive systems that make us human, and their evolution, to gain new insights into psychiatric disorders which are diagnosed and manifest in atypical interpersonal behaviours (e.g. Finding a scientific understanding of the processes which are at work in a face-to-face social interaction is both important and challenging. The natural ecological niche for some of the most fundamental human social interactions-conversations, confrontations and the bonding between parent and infant-is face-to-face. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Face2face: advancing the science of social interaction’. This theme issue makes a first step into this direction, with the aim to break down disciplinary boundaries and emphasizing the value of illuminating the many facets of face-to-face interaction. We suggest that this integrative approach will allow us to propel forwards the science of face-to-face interaction by leading us to new paradigms and novel, more ecologically grounded and comprehensive insights into how we interact with one another and with artificial agents, how differences in psychological profiles might affect interaction, and how the capacity to socially interact develops and has evolved in the human and other species. This special issue showcases a wide range of approaches, bringing together detailed studies of naturalistic social-interactional behaviour with larger scale analyses for generalization, and investigations of socially contextualized cognitive and neural processes that underpin the behaviour we observe. Research into the full complexities that define face-to-face interaction requires a multi-disciplinary, multi-level approach, illuminating from different perspectives how we and other species interact. Face-to-face interaction is core to human sociality and its evolution, and provides the environment in which most of human communication occurs. ![]()
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