From Gaze Perception to Social Cognition: The Shared-Attention System

Abstract

When two people look at the same object in the environment and are aware of each other’s attentional state, they find themselves in a shared-attention episode. This can occur through intentional or incidental signaling and, in either case, causes an exchange of information between the two parties about the environment and each other’s mental states. In this article, we give an overview of what is known about the building blocks of shared attention (gaze perception and joint attention) and focus on bringing to bear new findings on the initiation of shared attention that complement knowledge about gaze following and incorporate new insights from research into the sense of agency. We also present a neurocognitive model, incorporating first-, second-, and third-order social cognitive processes (the shared-attention system, or SAS), building on previous models and approaches. The SAS model aims to encompass perceptual, cognitive, and affective processes that contribute to and follow on from the establishment of shared attention. These processes include fundamental components of social cognition such as reward, affective evaluation, agency, empathy, and theory of mind.

Revisiting how we operationalize joint attention

“…A recent proposal inspired by dynamic systems theory (Thelen & Smith, 1996) envisions individual growth in attentional skills as a fundamentally social process influenced by both intrinsic and evoked activity whose inputs collectively produce the variable outcomes in children's ability to regulate attention (Yu & Smith, 2016). Another recent proposal focuses on the underpinnings of shared attention, arguing that such states can occur either intentionally or incidentally, but necessarily result in an exchange of information about the environment and the mental states of the parties involved (Stephenson et al, 2021). Our own efforts focus on what happens in parent-child dyads as children become developmentally able to actively engage with objects together with other people, who themselves may adjust their behavior to better support children's attentional focus (Dube et al, 2004).…”

“…Decades later, Michael Scaife and Jerome Bruner expanded on then-current theories of infant egocentrism (e.g., Butterworth, 1987) by demonstrating that infants can use the direction of another's gaze to purposefully redirect their own gaze (Scaife & Brunner, 1975). Since then, efforts to identify the mechanisms that underlie attention sharing-joint attention-have bridged the social and perceptual aspects of the processing involved (Siposova & Carpenter, 2019;Stephenson et al, 2021). Here, we characterize two broad perspectives on what joint attention is with the aim of identifying the key operationalization discrepancies that have contributed to confusion in the field.…”

Human but not robotic gaze facilitates action prediction

“…It has been proposed that mentalising abilities can be influenced by the ability to detect others' gaze direction (43), and that we may have an advantage in taking the perspective of agents we perceive similar to ourselves (e.g., ingroup vs outgroup; 52).…”

Effects of social and emotional context on neural activation and synchrony during movie viewing

“…Sharing the world with others is an integral part of how we perceive and learn about our world, as well as how we create social bonds [1][2][3] . The knowledge that we are attending to the same thing as another person (i.e., shared attention) can change our perception of that experience, and can impact cognitive processes such as memory, motivation, and judgments [4][5] . This shared attention often includes verbal or non-verbal communication among partners, but it does not necessarily require eye contact or even shared physical presence.…”