Potential social interactions are important to social attention

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2008

The present study examined how social attention is influenced by social content and the presence of items that are available for attention. We monitored observers' eye movements while they freely viewed real-world social scenes containing either 1 or 3 people situated among a variety of objects. Building from the work of we hypothesized that observers would demonstrate a preferential bias to fixate the eyes of the people in the scene, although other items would also receive attention. In addition, we hypothesized that fixations to the eyes would increase as the social content (i.e., number of people) increased. Both hypotheses were supported by the data, and we also found that the level of activity in the scene influenced attention to eyes when social content was high. The present results provide support for the notion that the eyes are selected by others in order to extract social information. Our study also suggests a simple and surreptitious methodology for studying social attention to real-world stimuli in a range of populations, such as those with autism spectrum disorders.

Imagine the following scenario at a typical conference. An attendee is walking between rows of posters, when he catches the eyes of a presenter. This eye contact is a cue that initiates a social interaction, and she asks if he would like to hear about the poster. The presenter looks and points at the first column of the poster, drawing attention to particular sentences and graphs. The listener alternates his gaze between the poster and the presenter's face. At the same time, the presenter is monitoring the listener's gaze to make sure that he is looking at the poster (and hence attending to the message) and that he is looking back at her (to signal his understanding).

PloS one, 2015

Social stimuli are known to both attract and direct our attention, but most research on social attention has been conducted in highly controlled laboratory settings lacking in social context. This study examined the role of social context on viewing behaviour of participants whilst they watched a dynamic social scene, under three different conditions. In two social groups, participants believed they were watching a live webcam of other participants. The socially-engaged group believed they would later complete a group task with the people in the video, whilst the non-engaged group believed they would not meet the people in the scene. In a third condition, participants simply free-viewed the same video with the knowledge that it was pre-recorded, with no suggestion of a later interaction. Results demonstrated that the social context in which the stimulus was viewed significantly influenced viewing behaviour. Specifically, participants in the social conditions allocated less visual at...

Cognition, 2015

Ears cannot speak, lips cannot hear, but eyes can both signal and perceive. For human beings, this dual function makes the eyes a remarkable tool for social interaction. For psychologists trying to understand eye movements, however, their dual function causes a fundamental ambiguity. In order to contrast signaling and perceiving functions of social gaze, we manipulated participants’ beliefs about social context as they looked at the same stimuli. Participants watched videos of faces of higher and lower ranked people, while they themselves were filmed. They believed either that the recordings of them would later be seen by the people in the videos or that no-one would see them. This manipulation significantly changed how participants responded to the social rank of the target faces. Specifically, when they believed that the targets would later be looking at them, and so could use gaze to signal information, participants looked proportionally less at the eyes of the higher ranked targets. We conclude that previous claims about eye movements and face perception that are based on a single social context can only be generalized with caution. A complete understanding of face perception needs to address both functions of social gaze.

Axel Seemann (ed.), Joint attention. Perspectives and Developments, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, January 2012, pp. 205-242.

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2012

Laboratory studies of social visual cognition often simulate the critical aspects of joint attention by having participants interact with a computer-generated avatar. Recently, there has been a movement toward examining these processes during authentic social interaction. In this review, we will focus on attention to faces, attentional misdirection, and a phenomenon we have termed social inhibition of return (Social IOR), that have revealed aspects of social cognition that were hitherto unknown. We attribute these discoveries to the use of paradigms that allow for more realistic social interactions to take place. We also point to an area that has begun to attract a considerable amount of interest-that of Theory of Mind (ToM) and automatic perspective taking-and suggest that this too might benefit from adopting a similar approach.

The function of joint attention (JA) is of crucial biological and social significance, as animal, developmental and neuropsychological studies show. Only recently though has the interest of attentional researchers been drawn to this effect. Numerous attention studies, by employing human gaze cues, demonstrate the unique effects elicited by such cues (i.e. prolonged facilitation and late inhibition), which are attributed to the heavy social significance of gaze cues. The present study aimed at examining whether social significance is, or is the only, source of such cueing effects, by, for the first time, employing animal in addition to human gaze stimuli in a JA paradigm (Experiment 1). Also, in contrast to evidence suggesting that face identity does not influence the JA effect, the authors manipulated different aspects of human face cues’ identity (i.e. trustworthiness evoked by a neutral face and familiarity with a face; Experiments 2 and 3), to gain a more in-depth understanding of how sociality of a face, which is inherent in that face’s identity, may account for the unique gaze cueing effects. Although results were mixed, overall it is suggested that social significance as well as specific properties of the identity of neutral face cues could modulate the function of joint attention. Limitations and future directions are further discussed.

2015

In face to face eye-tracking studies, researchers often use total fixation times on areas of interest to assess social attention. However, other measures can also be used to investigate potentially more subtle differences in social attention strategy. Eye-tracking data from a face to face interaction study will be presented which aimed to assess potential differences in social attention strategy between individuals who were classified as being high or low in autistic traits. No differences in overall fixations in various areas of interest were observed. However, there were clear differences in temporal dynamics of eye-movements. Individuals who were high in autistic traits exhibited reduced visual exploration overall, as demonstrated by shorter and less frequent saccades during the face to face interaction. Differences were not accounted for by social anxiety. Thus it is proposed that multiple eye-tracking measures should be used to understand more of the subtleties of visual attent...

PeerJ

Faces oriented rightwards are sometimes perceived as more dominant than faces oriented leftwards. In this study, we explored whether faces oriented rightwards can also elicit increased attentional orienting. Participants completed a discrimination task in which they were asked to discriminate, by means of a keypress, a peripheral target. At the same time, a task-irrelevant face oriented leftwards or rightwards appeared at the centre of the screen. The results showed that, while for faces oriented rightwards targets appearing on the right were responded to faster as compared to targets appearing on the left, for faces oriented leftwards no differences emerged between left and right targets. Furthermore, we also found a negative correlation between the magnitude of the orienting response elicited by the faces oriented leftwards and the level of conservatism of the participants. Overall, these findings provide evidence for the existence of a spatial bias reflected in social orienting.