Mechanisms of Social Attention

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Attentional selection is the process by which we act on behaviorally relevant information: one must first select information before it is interpreted and used to guide subsequent behavior. For instance, imagine the following scenario. You are walking down the street and come across a person staring intently up at the sky - determining her direction of gaze, you orient your attention to see what she is looking at. This process can be described by two distinct stages: first our attention is oriented to the eyes of another person (gaze selection) and then we orient our attention to where her gaze is directed (gaze following). Despite the putative existence of these two mechanisms of social attention, the majority of laboratory studies have focused exclusively on gaze following, bypassing the selection process. Using a change detection task combined with eye tracking, the proposed research will test the novel hypothesis that selection plays a key role in guiding attentional resources to socially relevant cues in the environment. Three key predictions arise from this framework. First, because socially relevant information is preferentially selected over nonsocial information, allowing observers to select information from their environment will lead them to prioritize following social cues over nonsocial cues, something that laboratory studies of gaze following have failed to observe. A second prediction is that selection is a key mechanism by which observers exert control over social attention when gaze direction is detrimental to task performance. A third and complementary prediction is that factors that enhance gaze selection - such as the social content of a scene and age-related increases in gaze selection- are likely to enhance subsequent gaze following. The findings will shed light on past work studying these mechanisms in isolation, going beyond previous theories that have dominated the field. My long term goal is to develop a new theoretical framework for understanding social attention as it operates outside traditional laboratory tasks, providing a launching point for future research examining social attention in real world settings.