This evidence supports a hypothesis that stop and go processes are under control of distinct neurochemical mechanisms.

We are highly tuned to each other's visual attention. Perceiving the eye or hand movements of another person can influence the timing of a saccade or the reach of our own. However, the explanation for such spatial orienting in interpersonal contexts remains disputed. Is it due to the social appearance of the cue—a hand or an eye—or due to its social relevance—a cue that is connected to another person with attentional and intentional states? We developed an interpersonal version of the Posner spatial cueing paradigm. Participants saw a cue and detected a target at the same or a different location, while interacting with an unseen partner. Participants were led to believe that the cue was either connected to the gaze location of their partner or was generated randomly by a computer (Experiment 1), and that their partner had higher or lower social rank while engaged in the same or a different task (Experiment 2). We found that spatial cue‐target compatibility effects were greater when the cue related to a partner's gaze. This effect was amplified by the partner's social rank, but only when participants believed their partner was engaged in the same task. Taken together, this is strong evidence in support of the idea that spatial orienting is interpersonally attuned to the social relevance of the cue—whether the cue is connected to another person, who this person is, and what this person is doing—and does not exclusively rely on the social appearance of the cue. Visual attention is not only guided by the physical salience of one's environment but also by the mental representation of its social relevance.

This research investigated how interactive social contexts shape basic visual attention. It has been shown that social information can modulate inhibition of return effects in joint spatial cueing tasks. We predicted that if perceptions of cooperativeness explain this phenomenon, we would then observe larger inhibition of return effects for more cooperative individuals and in highly cooperative contexts. Experiments 1a and 1b found larger inhibition of return effects and greater perceptions of cooperativeness for female compared to male participants, consistent with the literature on gender stereotypes and the behavioural evidence that females are more cooperative than males. In Experiment 2a and 2b, we experimentally manipulated the cooperativeness of the task, describing it as either a team or an individual game. This time, we found larger inhibition of return effects and greater perceptions of cooperativeness for male participants in the team compared to the individual game. We conclude that construing interactive contexts as cooperative plays an important role in the joint spatial orienting of visual attention, and we propose this as an example of socially distributed cognition.

No abstract

We found evidence from a randomised controlled trial that a simple set of techniques can improve the experience of online meetings. Video conferencing technology has practical benefits, but psychological costs. It has allowed industry, education and social interactions to continue in some form during the covid-19 lockdowns. But it has left many users feeling fatigued and socially isolated, perhaps becausethe limitations of video conferencing disrupt users’ability to coordinate interactions and foster social affiliation. Video Meeting Signals (VMS™) is a simple technique that uses gestures to overcome some of these limitations. We carried out a randomisedcontrolled trial with over 100 students, in which half underwent a short training session in VMS. All participants rated their subjective experience of two weekly seminars, and transcripts were objectively coded for the valence of language used. Compared to controls, seminar groups with VMS training rated their personal experience, their feelings toward their group, and their perceived learning outcomes as significantly higher. Also, they were more likely to use positive language and less likely to use negative language. While future, pre-registered experiments will explore which aspects of the technique are responsible for these benefits, the current results establish that VMS has great potential to overcome the psychological problems of group video meetings.