Social presence and its role in social interactions: insights, challenges and a call for action

Over the past decades, we have seen a fundamentally new form of social interaction become more and more common in our everyday lives: mediated social interactions, in which we do not speak to a person face-to-face, but the interaction takes place via a video call or some other form of technology. While most people would agree that a mediated interaction is somehow different from a face-to-face interaction, we currently lack a framework for conceptualizing what exactly is different. This is especially important when studying how mediated interactions shape our understanding of others' mental states and its neural basis. To address this gap, we propose a framework that conceptualizes the impact of social presence on social interactions and their neural underpinnings along a continuum of two key dimensions: physical and temporal presence. Whereas physical presence refers to the amount of sensory information available, temporal presence refers to the synchrony with which information is available. We argue that a systematic manipulation of both dimensions is essential for our understanding of the impact of social presence on social cognition and affect. Our conceptual framework will lay ground for integrating and advancing research on this topic in social neuroscience and beyond.