Coordinating attention requires coordinated senses

Abstract

From playing basketball to ordering at a food counter, we frequently and effortlessly coordinate our attention with others towards a common focus: we look at the ball, or point at a piece of cake. This non-verbal coordination of attention plays a fundamental role in our social lives: it ensures that we refer to the same object, develop a shared language, understand each other's mental states, and coordinate our actions. Models of joint attention generally attribute this accomplishment to gaze coordination. But are visual attentional mechanisms sufficient to achieve joint attention, in all cases? Besides cases where visual information is missing, we show how combining it with other senses can be helpful, and even necessary to certain uses of joint attention. We explain the two ways in which non-visual cues contribute to joint attention: either as enhancers, when they complement gaze and pointing gestures in order to coordinate joint attention on visible objects, or as modality pointers, when joint attention needs to be shifted away from the whole object to one of its properties, say weight or texture. This multisensory approach to joint attention has important implications for social robotics, clinical diagnostics, pedagogy and theoretical debates on the construction of a shared world.

Multi-scale detection of pulmonary nodules by integrating attention mechanism

“…The coordinate attention mechanism 25 , 26 (Coordinate Attention, hereinafter the module is denoted as Coord) is shown in Fig. 3 , including two parts: information embedding and attention generation.…”

Political polarization: Radicalism and immune beliefs

“…As Ophelia Deroy has recently argued (Deroy 2019; see also Battich et al 2020), although sharing the same experiences with people who are a bit too much like us can give rise to dangerous consequences, at the same time, it is crucial for being part of a shared reality. Joint action and joint attention have enormous advantages, and part of what makes them possible is sharing experiences with people who have similar goals.…”

A Trained Humanoid Robot can Perform Human-Like Crossmodal Social Attention and Conflict Resolution

“…During the task, the eye gaze is presented as the visual cue in the middle of the screen, followed by a peripheral target, which could be spatially congruent (e.g., a right-shift eye gaze followed by a square frame or a Gabor patch shown on the right side of the screen), or incongruent. However, studying the visual modality alone is not enough to reveal how humans can quickly recognise social and emotional information conveyed by others in an environment full of multimodal information [ 8 ]. Selecting information from the environment across different sensory modalities allows humans to detect crucial information such as life threats, survival strategies, etc.…”