Simulating social interactions for the experimental investigation of joint attention

Caruana, Nathan; McArthur, Genevieve; Woolgar, Alexandra; Brock, Jon

doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.12.022

Cited by 56 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…A similar dynamic framework has been advanced by Ristic and Enns, who, based on a review of developmental data, argued that the classic concept of attention as a static gating mechanism does not capture the new findings showing attention as dynamic ability that both influences and is influenced by the interactions between cues, contexts, persons, and their behaviors . The present conceptualization extends these general principles to the realm of social attention by identifying the processes that enable such interplay within this specific functional domain and in turn facilitate dynamic social interactive behaviors such as reciprocal and shared attention.…”

Section: Future Directions and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 67%

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How attention gates social interactions

Capozzi

Ristic

2018

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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Social interactions are at the core of social life. However, humans selectively choose their exchange partners and do not engage in all available opportunities for social encounters. In this review, we argue that attentional systems play an important role in guiding the selection of social interactions. Supported by both classic and emerging literature, we identify and characterize the three core processes-perception, interpretation, and evaluation-that interact with attentional systems to modulate selective responses to social environments. Perceptual processes facilitate attentional prioritization of social cues. Interpretative processes link attention with understanding of cues' social meanings and agents' mental states. Evaluative processes determine the perceived value of the source of social information. The interplay between attention and these three routes of processing places attention in a powerful role to manage the selection of the vast amount of social information that individuals encounter on a daily basis and, in turn, gate the selection of social interactions.

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Section: Future Directions and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 67%

“…In turn, in recent years, researchers started developing novel approaches showcasing increasing ecological validity. This involved both modifying the existing laboratory manipulations as well as studying social attention during real‐life naturalistic situations …”

Section: A Brief History and The Current State Of The Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

How attention gates social interactions

Capozzi

Ristic

2018

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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“…In the current study, we addressed these questions in the context of a virtual "joint 82 Our joint attention task builds on several recent neuroimaging studies of joint 92 attention (see Caruana, et al, 2017a) in which participants' eye-movements are tracked as 93 they interact with an animated virtual character, whose own eye-movements are responsive to 94 those of the participant. In some studies, participants have been told that the "avatar" is 95 controlled by a second participant whose eye movements are also being recorded (e.g., 96…”

Section: States? 81mentioning

confidence: 99%

Human agency beliefs influence behaviour during virtual social interactions

Caruana

Spirou

Brock

2017

Preprint

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In recent years, with the emergence of relatively inexpensive and accessible virtual reality technologies, it is now possible to deliver compelling and realistic simulations of human-tohuman interaction. Neuroimaging studies have shown that, when participants believe they are interacting via a virtual interface with another human agent, they show different patterns of brain activity compared to when they know that their virtual partner is computer-controlled. The suggestion is that users adopt an "intentional stance" by attributing mental states to their virtual partner. However, it remains unclear how beliefs in the agency of a virtual partner influence participants' behaviour and subjective experience of the interaction. We investigated this issue in the context of a cooperative "joint attention" game in which participants interacted via an eye tracker with a virtual onscreen partner, directing each other's eye gaze to different screen locations. Half of the participants were correctly informed that their partner was controlled by a computer algorithm ("Computer" condition). The other half were misled into believing that the virtual character was controlled by a second participant in another room ("Human" condition).Those in the "Human" condition were slower to make eye contact with their partner and more likely to try and guide their partner before they had established mutual eye contact than participants in the "Computer" condition. They also responded more rapidly when their partner was guiding them, although the same effect was also found for a control condition in which they responded to an arrow cue. Results confirm the influence of human agency beliefs on behaviour in this virtual social interaction context. They further suggest that researchers and developers attempting to simulate social interactions should consider the impact of agency beliefs on user experience in other social contexts, and their effect on the achievement of the application's goals.PeerJ Preprints | https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3018v1 | CC BY 4.0 Open Access |

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“…Similarly, attitudes and performance in interactions with nonhuman agents can be improved when the agents trigger mind perception by displaying human features or behaviors (Bennewitz, Faber, Joho, Schreiber, & Behnke, 2005;Fussell, Kiesler, Setlock, & Yew, 2008;Huang & Thomaz, 2011;Mutlu, Forlizzi, & Hodgins, 2006;Mutlu, Kanda, Forlizzi, Hodgins, & Ishiguro, 2012;Pfeiffer-Leßmann, Pfeiffer, & Wachsmuth, 2018;Sidner, Kidd, Lee, & Lesh, 2004;Staudte & Crocker, 2011;Wiese, Metta, & Wykowska, 2017;Yamazaki, Yamazaki, Burdelski, Kuno, & Fukushima, 2010). In contrast, agents not triggering mind perception negatively impact performance in social interactions (Caruana et al, 2016;Wiese et al, 2012;Wykowska et al, 2014) and fail to induce social facilitation (Bartneck, 2003;Park & Catrambone, 2007;Riether, Hegel, Wrede, & Horstmann, 2012;Woods, Dautenhahn, & Kaouri, 2005). Specifically, it has been shown that social signals, like changes in gaze direction, are followed to a larger extent when they are believed to reflect the actions of a mind compared to a preprogrammed algorithm (Caruana et al, 2016;Wiese et al, 2012;Wykowska et al, 2014), with faster responses to targets presented at gazed-at locations (gaze-cueing effect; Friesen & Kingstone, 1998).…”

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confidence: 99%

Seeing minds in others: Mind perception modulates low-level social-cognitive performance and relates to ventromedial prefrontal structures

Wiese

Buzzell

Abubshait

et al. 2018

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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In social interactions, we rely on nonverbal cues like gaze direction to understand the behavior of others. How we react to these cues is affected by whether they are believed to originate from an entity with a mind, capable of having internal states (i.e., mind perception). While prior work has established a set of neural regions linked to social-cognitive processes like mind perception, the degree to which activation within this network relates to performance in subsequent social-cognitive tasks remains unclear. In the current study, participants performed a mind perception task (i.e., judging the likelihood that faces, varying in physical human-likeness, have internal states) while event-related fMRI was collected. Afterwards, participants performed a social attention task outside the scanner, during which they were cued by the gaze of the same faces that they previously judged within the mind perception task. Parametric analyses of the fMRI data revealed that activity within ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was related to both mind ratings inside the scanner and gaze-cueing performance outside the scanner. In addition, other social brain regions were related to gaze-cueing performance, including frontal areas like the left insula, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and inferior frontal gyrus, as well as temporal areas like the left temporo-parietal junction and bilateral temporal gyri. The findings suggest that functions subserved by the vmPFC are relevant to both mind perception and social attention, implicating a role of vmPFC in the top-down modulation of low-level social-cognitive processes.

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Simulating social interactions for the experimental investigation of joint attention

Cited by 56 publications

References 47 publications

How attention gates social interactions

How attention gates social interactions

Human agency beliefs influence behaviour during virtual social interactions

Seeing minds in others: Mind perception modulates low-level social-cognitive performance and relates to ventromedial prefrontal structures

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