Influence of loneliness and social isolation on attention to social interactions

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My PhD research explored the ability of human vision to be captured and held by observed social interactions, pre-adolescent childhood and young adults. With the help of eye-movements measurements while viewing naturalistic scenes depicting people having social interactions, my research investigated:1. Given that the social brain structures are not yet developed, are children and adults any different in the way they observe social information?2. Are children sensitive to the presence of a social interaction?3. Can social interactions "win" when they must compete for attention with other social information, such as single people?4. Are children and adults any different in how they recognise and define social interactions?5. Are there developmental changes in the way socially ambiguous scenes are viewed?Crucially, my research showed that children and adults are driven to attend to and look for social information in a very similar way, and their attention is similarly drawn to individuals engaged in social interactions. Two people interacting will hold our attention for longer, compared to when they are not interacting, and this is true for children as well. That young children already show this "bias" towards social interactions suggests social interactions must contain some valuable information for social learning, predicting social actions, and understanding other people's relationships and social decisions. Finally, we found that adults are more likely to consider an ambiguous social situation to be an interaction, compared to children, potentially reflecting some role of social experience in shaping our understanding of social scenes. One primary aim of the fellowship is to provide the time and space to finish publishing the findings from my PhD.Given the demonstrated value of social information as early as 6, and social interactions in particular, my work during the fellowship period is to investigate how social experience and social wellbeing may dynamically influence these processes. Perceived loneliness and social isolation can both have potentially harmful effects on the individual, at any age. Here I ask: does loneliness or social isolation change how an individual views social information? To answer this question, I plan to measure how the the size of our social network, and our level of loneliness relates to how we attend to social information, using the experimental methods and paradigms I developed throughout my PhD.My ultimate ambition here is to lay the theoretical foundation for further investigations looking at the influence of loneliness and social isolation on social attention across the lifespan, and especially in older adults. Loneliness research has the strong potential to impact on the wellbeing of many potentially isolated groups across the lifespan. Thus, across the fellowship, I will work with my mentors to expland my knowledge and training to support writing a funding application to expand this work to address similar questions in older age.More generally, this fellowship will allow me to communicate my PhD findings on the importance of social interactions and social information for cognitive and social development to a variety of audiences, academic and non. Considering that loneliness research is of particular intrest to aging groups, I will be liasing with charities and outreach organisations that support older adults, as well as presenting to older adults themselves to communicate findings and develop plans for future work with aging groups.