Mechanisms of Social Attention

社会关注机制

• 批准号: 418668-2013
• 负责人: Birmingham, Elina
• 金额: $ 2.11万
• 依托单位: Simon Fraser University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2017-01-01 至 2018-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=631368
• 关键词: Mechanisms; Social; Attention

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.

注意选择是我们对行为相关信息采取行动的过程：一个人必须首先选择信息，然后才能解释并用于指导后续行为。例如，想象一下下面的场景。你走在街上，遇到一个人目不转睛地盯着天空——确定了她凝视的方向，你调整你的注意力，看看她在看什么。这个过程可以用两个不同的阶段来描述：首先，我们的注意力被定向到另一个人的眼睛上（凝视选择），然后我们将注意力定向到她凝视的方向上（凝视跟随）。尽管假定存在这两种社会注意机制，但大多数实验室研究只关注注视跟随，绕过了选择过程。通过结合眼动追踪的变化检测任务，该研究将验证一种新的假设，即选择在引导注意力资源转向环境中与社会相关的线索方面起着关键作用。从这个框架中可以得出三个关键的预测。首先，因为社会相关信息优先于非社会信息，允许观察者从他们的环境中选择信息将导致他们优先遵循社会线索而不是非社会线索，这是注视跟随的实验室研究未能观察到的。第二个预测是，当凝视方向不利于任务表现时，选择是观察者控制社会注意力的关键机制。第三个也是互补的预测是，增强凝视选择的因素——比如场景的社交内容和与年龄相关的凝视选择的增加——可能会增强随后的凝视跟随。这些发现将为过去孤立地研究这些机制的工作提供启示，超越了之前主导该领域的理论。我的长期目标是开发一个新的理论框架来理解社会注意力，因为它在传统的实验室任务之外运作，为未来在现实世界环境中研究社会注意力提供一个起点。