Influence of loneliness and social isolation on attention to social interactions

我的博士研究探索了人类视觉被观察到的社会互动、青春期前的童年和年轻人所捕捉和保持的能力。在观看描绘人们进行社交互动的自然场景时，借助眼球运动测量，我的研究调查了：1。考虑到社会大脑结构尚未发育，儿童和成人在观察社会信息的方式上有什么不同吗？孩子们对社会互动的存在敏感吗？当社交互动必须与其他社会信息（如单身人士）竞争注意力时，它们能“赢”吗？儿童和成人在认识和定义社会互动方面有什么不同吗？看待社会模糊场景的方式是否有发展变化？至关重要的是，我的研究表明，儿童和成人以非常相似的方式关注和寻找社会信息，他们的注意力同样被参与社会互动的个人所吸引。两个人互动会比他们不互动时更能吸引我们的注意力，这对孩子来说也是如此。幼儿已经表现出对社会互动的这种“偏见”，这表明社会互动必须包含一些有价值的信息，用于社会学习，预测社会行为，理解他人的关系和社会决策。最后，我们发现，与儿童相比，成年人更有可能将模棱两可的社交情境视为一种互动，这可能反映了社会经验在塑造我们对社交场景的理解方面的某些作用。奖学金的一个主要目的是提供时间和空间来完成我的博士研究成果的发表。考虑到早在6岁时社会信息的价值，特别是社会互动，我在奖学金期间的工作是研究社会经验和社会福利如何动态影响这些过程。在任何年龄，感知到的孤独和社会孤立都可能对个人产生潜在的有害影响。我的问题是：孤独或社会孤立会改变一个人看待社会信息的方式吗？为了回答这个问题，我打算用我在博士期间开发的实验方法和范式来衡量我们的社会网络的规模和我们的孤独程度与我们如何处理社会信息的关系。我在这里的最终目标是为进一步研究孤独和社会孤立对整个生命周期，尤其是老年人的社会注意力的影响奠定理论基础。孤独研究在整个生命周期中对许多潜在孤立群体的健康有很大的影响。因此，在整个奖学金期间，我将与我的导师一起解释我的知识和培训，以支持撰写资助申请，以扩展这项工作，以解决老年人的类似问题。更一般地说，这个奖学金将使我能够将我的博士研究成果，关于社会互动和社会信息对认知和社会发展的重要性，传达给各种各样的受众，学术和非学术。考虑到老年人对孤独研究特别感兴趣，我将与支持老年人的慈善机构和外展组织联系，并向老年人本人介绍研究结果，并制定未来与老年人合作的计划。

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.