Potential social interactions are important to social attention

Abstract

Social attention, or how spatial attention is allocated to biologically relevant stimuli, has typically been studied using simplistic paradigms that do not provide any opportunity for social interaction. To study social attention in a complex setting that affords social interaction, we measured participants' looking behavior as they were sitting in a waiting room, either in the presence of a confederate posing as another research participant, or in the presence of a videotape of the same confederate. Thus, the potential for social interaction existed only when the confederate was physically present. Although participants frequently looked at the videotaped confederate, they seldom turned toward or looked at the live confederate. Ratings of participants' social skills correlated with head turns to the live, but not videotaped, confederate. Our results demonstrate the importance of studying social attention within a social context, and suggest that the mere opportunity for social interaction can alter social attention.eye movements | overt visual attention | visual cognition | autism

Brief Report: Patterns of Eye Movements in Face to Face Conversation are Associated with Autistic Traits: Evidence from a Student Sample

“…Klin et al 2002;Nakano et al, 2010;Riby & Hancock, 2008), but is in-line with recent findings that observed no overall reduction in eye-region viewing in older, high functioning individuals with autism when only one face or person was present in the each visual stimulus (Fletcher-Watson et al 2009;Freeth et al 2010). Findings from this new cohort of participants replicated previous findings, from Freeth et al (2013a) and Laidlaw et al (2011), using equipment enabling a much more finegrained temporal and spatial analysis of eye-movements compared to these previous studies and indicate that individuals with more autistic traits are focussing on socially relevant areas within their visual field as much as individuals who show fewer autistic traits, providing the opportunity to effectively spot and process any subtle social cues that may be produced by the social partner. In contrast to the current findings, when participants viewed a video presentation of the experimenter asking questions and listening to answers in the study by Freeth et al (2013a), a simple relationship was found between reduced looking to the experimenter and more autistic traits.…”

“…This absence of a relationship between autistic traits and amount of time spent looking directly at the experimenter was also observed in a face-to-face interaction by Freeth et al (2013a) and when there was potential for a social interaction by Laidlaw et al (2011). The nature of this finding is different to the reduced attention to faces often observed in children with autism (e.g.…”

“…No relationship between time spent looking at a social partner during a live interaction and amount of autistic traits was found in adults (Freeth et al, 2013a). Laidlaw et al (2011) also found no relationship between scores on the social skills sub-scale of the Autism-spectrum Quotient questionnaire (AQ, a self-report measure of autistic traits, BaronCohen et al, 2001b) and fixations on a potential social partner in a naturalistic situation.…”

“…Although recent studies have demonstrated that a simple relationship between increased autistic traits and reduced attention to a social partner in a face-to-face situation does not exist (Freeth et al, 2013a;Laidlaw et al 2011), the potential for more subtle differences were not explored in these studies.…”

Perceived live interaction modulates the developing social brain

“…Behavioral evidence, however, from both adults (e.g. Okita et al, 2007;Laidlaw et al, 2011) and children (Kuhl et al, 2003;Goldstein and Schwade, 2008;Kirschner and Tomasello, 2009) suggests that live, interactive context significantly alters response to otherwise matched social stimuli. Adult neuroimaging research has begun to identify the neural bases of social interaction (e.g.…”