Abstract
Eye contact provides a communicative link between humans, prompting joint attention. As spontaneous brain activity might have an important role in the coordination of neuronal processing within the brain, their inter-subject synchronization might occur during eye contact. To test this, we conducted simultaneous functional MRI in pairs of adults. Eye contact was maintained at baseline while the subjects engaged in real-time gaze exchange in a joint attention task. Averted gaze activated the bilateral occipital pole extending to the right posterior superior temporal sulcus, the dorso-medial prefrontal cortex, and the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus. Following a partner's gaze toward an object activated the left intraparietal sulcus. After all the task-related effects were modeled out, inter-individual correlation analysis of residual time-courses was performed. Paired subjects showed more prominent correlations than non-paired subjects in the right inferior frontal gyrus, suggesting that this region is involved in sharing intention during eye contact that provides the context for joint attention.
Highlights
Humans possess remarkable social attention capability, which allows us to detect other people’s focus of attention, orient our own attention to the same location, and draw inferences regarding their goals (Nummenmaa and Calder, 2009)
According to the model proposed by Baron-Cohen (1995), joint attention is composed of intention detection (ID), eye-direction detection (EDD), a shared attention mechanism (SAM), and a theory-ofmind mechanism (ToMM)
The main effects of eye cueing by means of the contrast of (ES′ + EN′) − (BS′ + BN′) were found in the visual cortices including the bilateral occipital pole, the right MT/ V5 extending to the fusiform gyrus, the middle temporal gyrus, and the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) (Figure 4; Table 1)
Summary
Humans possess remarkable social attention capability, which allows us to detect other people’s focus of attention, orient our own attention to the same location, and draw inferences regarding their goals (Nummenmaa and Calder, 2009). Gaze processing extends well beyond the STS to include the amygdala (Kawashima et al, 1999; George et al, 2001), the inferior temporal (Wicker et al, 1998), parietal (Wicker et al, 1998; Hoffman and Haxby, 2000; Hooker et al, 2003; Mosconi et al, 2005; Calder et al, 2007), medial prefrontal, and anterior cingulate cortices (Calder et al, 2002; Williams et al, 2005), and other frontal regions (Hooker et al, 2003; Mosconi et al, 2005; Williams et al, 2005; Bristow et al, 2007). Research in gaze processing is outlining the neural basis of social attention, the cognitive components of which include the directing of social attention, attention shifting, processing of emotional reactions, and attribution of mental states
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