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New Frontiers of Investigation in Social Attention

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The Many Faces of Social Attention

Abstract

It has been 50 years since the term social attention was coined to refer to a special form of social awareness signaled by physical proximity, head and body orientation to conspecifics, and dynamic gaze. Since then the research in social attention has undergone substantial changes in direction, largely driven by developments in technology and scientific methods, as well as the emergence of new disciplines such as cognitive and social neuroscience. In this book we celebrate these advances over the past 50 years, and feature research that spans mature and developing neurotypical humans, as well as individuals with autism spectrum disorders. Behavioral methods such as eye tracking give unique insights into the behavior of preverbal humans, and measurements of brain activity (ascertained either neurophysiologically or hemodynamically) have allowed investigations into how social attention is deployed in developing and mature human subjects. The field appears to be currently experiencing a paradigm shift in experimentation, with more investigators trying to use ecologically valid stimuli and naturalistic tasks. Important differences in results between standard, static traditional laboratory-based tasks and these new approaches are examined and compared. Importantly, these new research directions have implications for our understanding of disorders of social cognition.

Research in the area of social attention in healthy human subjects and individuals with neuropsychiatric disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD), indicates that there appear to be some core deficits that center on the deployment of social attention. How these deficits manifest and develop is currently an active area of investigation, and some exciting new research suggests that even at an early age, before the emergence of visibly disordered social cognition, the mechanisms involved in attending to social stimuli can already be very different in individuals whose social cognition remains normal, or ultimately becomes aberrant. In all chapters of this book we pose outstanding questions for the field, and in the concluding chapter we draw the current research together and attempt to predict how research in social attention might play out over the next decade or so. This is an exciting time to be working in this area, and this book attempts to feature some of the field changing research in social attention.

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  1. Psychological & Brain Sciences, Indiana University, 1101 East 10th St, 47405, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Aina Puce & Bennett I. Bertenthal

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    Aina Puce

  2. Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

    Bennett I. Bertenthal

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Puce, A., Bertenthal, B. (2015). New Frontiers of Investigation in Social Attention. In: Puce, A., Bertenthal, B. (eds) The Many Faces of Social Attention. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21368-2_1

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