Social status modulates social attention in humans

Dalmaso, Mario; Pavan, Giulia; Castelli, Luigi; Galfano, Giovanni

doi:10.1037/e512592013-374

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The lockdown provided a unique opportunity to evaluate the effects of a sudden, unexpected, and dramatic reduction of face-to-face social exchanges on the basic cognitive mechanisms subtending our social behavior. Among these, social attention, namely the hard-wired ability to orient one's attention in response to social signals provided by others, represents one of the most relevant building blocks shaping social cognition, involved in perspective taking and creating shared representations of the environment (Capozzi and Ristic, 2018;Dalmaso et al, 2020a;Emery, 2000). More specifically, it has been widely documented that people tend to orient their attentional resources toward the same spatial location gazed at by another individual.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increased gaze cueing of attention during COVID-19 lockdown

Dalmaso¹,

Castelli²,

Galfano³

2021

iScience

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Affiliation with others is a basic human need. The lockdown implemented for counteracting the COVID-19 pandemic has determined an unprecedented situation of social deprivation, forcing individuals to dramatically reduce face-toface interactions. This, in turn, has caused relevant consequences on psychological well-being. However, the impact of lockdown-related social isolation on basic cognitive processes is still largely unknown. Here, we focus on social attention and address gaze cueing, namely the ability to shift attention in response to the gaze of others. This is a hard-wired cognitive mechanism critically supporting the establishment of social interactions and pervasive relationships among individuals. Our results show a stronger gaze-cueing effect during, rather than after, the lockdown, whose magnitude was positively correlated with social isolation distress. These findings indicate that, in a condition of prolonged social deprivation, orienting of attention may be shaped by hypersensitivity to social cues, likely due to the strive to reconnect with others.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increased gaze cueing of attention during COVID-19 lockdown

Dalmaso¹,

Castelli²,

Galfano³

2021

iScience

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The neural basis of intergroup threat effect on social attention

Chen

Zhao

Song

et al. 2017

Sci Rep

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Previous gaze-cuing studies found that intergroup threat is one of the modulators of gaze cuing. These findings indicate that intergroup threat would gate social attention by activating a network resembling that is thought to be involved in drawing or/and holding attention. The present study tested this hypothesis using a gaze-cuing task in which a particular in-group participants observed threatening out-group and nonthreatening out-group gazes, while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. As expected, greater gaze cuing effect only emerged for threatening out-group when the in-group participants only felt inergroup threat from that out-group. Behaviorally, we found intergroup threatening out-group gazes did not draw attention faster than nonthreatening in-group gazes does. However, participants took more time to suppress the influence of the gaze direction of threatening out-group gazes, compared to nonthreatening in-group gazes, in the incongruent condition, which means intergroup threatening gaze holds attention longer than nonthreatening gaze does. Imaging results demonstrated that threatening cues recruited a fronto-parietal network, previously implicated in holding attention and execution functions. Our results, therefore, suggest that the mechanisms underpinning gaze cuing evolved to be sensitive to intergroup threatening stimuli, possibly because it is hard to disengage from such intergroup threatening cues once they are detected.

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Social status modulates social attention in humans

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Increased gaze cueing of attention during COVID-19 lockdown

Increased gaze cueing of attention during COVID-19 lockdown

The neural basis of intergroup threat effect on social attention

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