Abstract
Social understanding is facilitated by effectively attending to other people and the subtle social cues they generate. In order to more fully appreciate the nature of social attention and what drives people to attend to social aspects of the world, one must investigate the factors that influence social attention. This is especially important when attempting to create models of disordered social attention, e.g. a model of social attention in autism. Here we analysed participants' viewing behaviour during one-to-one social interactions with an experimenter. Interactions were conducted either live or via video (social presence manipulation). The participant was asked and then required to answer questions. Experimenter eye-contact was either direct or averted. Additionally, the influence of participant self-reported autistic traits was also investigated. We found that regardless of whether the interaction was conducted live or via a video, participants frequently looked at the experimenter's face, and they did this more often when being asked a question than when answering. Critical differences in social attention between the live and video interactions were also observed. Modifications of experimenter eye contact influenced participants' eye movements in the live interaction only; and increased autistic traits were associated with less looking at the experimenter for video interactions only. We conclude that analysing patterns of eye-movements in response to strictly controlled video stimuli and natural real-world stimuli furthers the field's understanding of the factors that influence social attention.
Highlights
The world around us contains a vast array of often rapidly changing information
We investigated whether the amount of autistic traits an individual possesses correlates with social attention behaviour in a live interaction and an interaction presented via video
Experiment 1 found that participants spent a large proportion of their viewing time directing their attention at their social partner, especially looking at the experimenter’s face, even though the experimenter’s face occupied only a small portion of the visual field
Summary
The world around us contains a vast array of often rapidly changing information. Selectively attending to relevant information helps us to better understand our environment and to make informed judgements on the best future course of action. If we can identify the factors that influence social attention and understand how these factors influence social attention, this will lead to a better understanding of human social behaviour. To date the majority of social attention research has not been conducted in real-world settings. The vast majority of social attention research has been conducted using computers in laboratory settings in which the social partner is not physically present, see [7,8,9] for reviews. Extremely valuable in improving knowledge of some of the mechanisms that underlie social attention, this approach may cause researchers to overlook certain factors that influence real world social attention behaviour
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