Social cognition as the capacity to process socially relevant information is an essential component of the human cognitive equipment that allows us to communicate and interact with others and to adapt to complex affordances created by our social environment; seemingly effortlessly we are able to generate impressions and make inferences about the inner experience of others in everyday life. However, the enormous variations of social behaviour and diversity in human communication often enough challenge our capacity to understand others and can lead to misunderstandings in social encounters. Research activities from many different fields have identified a variety of factors (age, gender, culture, norm deviance, language modalities) as influential sources of variance in social information processing. In this presentation, I will talk about psychological processes and neural mechanisms (employing functional magnetic resonance imaging) that underly nonverbal communication focusing on gaze perception, impression formation and true interaction with a special focus on the variance related to the psychopathology of high-functioning autism. These studies are crucial to our basic understanding of human communication and interaction and their disturbances.