Abstract
The early emerging capacity for Joint Attention (JA), or socially coordinated visual attention, is thought to be integral to the development of social-cognition in childhood. Recent studies have also begun to suggest that JA affects adult cognition as well, but methodological limitations hamper research on this topic. To address this issue we developed a novel virtual reality paradigm that integrates eye-tracking and virtual avatar technology to measure two types of JA in adults, Initiating Joint Attention (IJA) and Responding to Joint Attention (RJA). Distinguishing these types of JA in research is important because they are thought to reflect unique, as well as common constellations of processes involved in human social-cognition and social learning. We tested the validity of the differentiation of IJA and RJA in our paradigm in two studies of picture recognition memory in undergraduate students. Study 1 indicated that young adults correctly identified more pictures they had previously viewed in an IJA condition (67%) than in a RJA (58%) condition, η2 = 0.57. Study 2 controlled for IJA and RJA stimulus viewing time differences, and replicated the findings of Study 1. The implications of these results for the validity of the paradigm and research on the affects of JA on adult social-cognition are discussed.
Highlights
Human beings have an exquisitely honed capacity to coordinate their attention with that of other people
joint attention (JA) is often defined in terms of socially coordinated visual attention, and operationalized with measures of the ability to follow the gaze of another person to adopt a common point of reference (Responding to Joint attention, Responding to Joint Attention (RJA)), and to use one’s own gaze direction or gestures to initiate a common point of reference with another person (Initiating Joint Attention, IJA; Seibert et al, 1982)
The results of Study 1 were consistent with the hypothesis that JA may affect information processing in adults, and that IJA and RJA may impact encoding and memory differently
Summary
Human beings have an exquisitely honed capacity to coordinate their attention with that of other people. Bockler et al (2011) reported an innovative study that indicated that the experience of JA with another person enhanced participants’ mental spatial rotation problem solving in order to judge the similarity of variously positioned images of right versus left hands. This finding is consistent with the long-standing hypothesis that JA affects and is affected by the self-referenced spatial information processing ability of the individual (Butterworth and Jarrett, 1991). Bayliss et al (2006) have observed that social-gaze directed cuing to pictures (i.e., emulated RJA) enhanced the subjective positive valence of the pictures for adults compared to a condition involving non-social directional cuing to pictures
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