Mechanisms Of Social Attention Research Articles

An Enhanced Vehicle Trajectory Prediction Model Leveraging LSTM and Social-Attention Mechanisms

An Enhanced Vehicle Trajectory Prediction Model Leveraging LSTM and Social-Attention Mechanisms

Predicting Pedestrian Trajectories with Deep Adversarial Networks Considering Motion and Spatial Information

This paper proposes a novel prediction model termed the social and spatial attentive generative adversarial network (SSA-GAN). The SSA-GAN framework utilizes a generative approach, where the generator employs social attention mechanisms to accurately model social interactions among pedestrians. Unlike previous methodologies, our model utilizes comprehensive motion features as query vectors, significantly enhancing predictive performance. Additionally, spatial attention is integrated to encapsulate the interactions between pedestrians and their spatial context through semantic spatial features. Moreover, we present a novel approach for generating simulated multi-trajectory datasets using the CARLA simulator. This method circumvents the limitations inherent in existing public datasets such as UCY and ETH, particularly when evaluating multi-trajectory metrics. Our experimental findings substantiate the efficacy of the proposed SSA-GAN model in capturing the nuances of pedestrian interactions and providing accurate multimodal trajectory predictions.

Vigilance or avoidance: How do autistic traits and social anxiety modulate attention to the eyes?

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are highly overlapping in symptoms and have a high rate of comorbidity, posing challenges in diagnosis and intervention for both disorders. Both disorders are linked to abnormal attention to the eyes, yet how they interactively modulate the attentional process to the eyes remains unclear. In this study, we explored how autistic traits and social anxiety in college students separately and together affected different temporal stages of attention to the eyes. Participants were instructed to view virtual faces for 10 s and make an emotional judgment, while their eye movements were recorded. We found that social anxiety and autistic traits affected different temporal stages of eye-looking. Social anxiety only affected the first fixation duration on the eyes, while autistic traits were associated with eye avoidance at several time points in the later stage. More importantly, we found an interactive effect of autistic traits and social anxiety on the initial attention to the eyes: Among people scoring high on autistic traits, social anxiety was related to an early avoidance of the eyes as well as attention maintenance once fixated on the eyes. Our study suggests the separate and interactive roles of social anxiety and autistic traits in attention to the eyes. It contributes to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of social attention in both SAD and ASD and highlights the application of psychiatric diagnoses using eye-tracking techniques.

Does self-construal shape automatic social attention?

We examined whether activating independent or interdependent self-construal modulates attention shifting in response to group gaze cues. European Canadians (Study 1) and East Asian Canadians (Study 2) primed with independence vs. interdependence completed a multi-gaze cueing task with a central face gazing left or right, flanked by multiple background faces that either matched or mismatched the direction of the foreground gaze. Results showed that European Canadians (Study 1) mostly ignored background gaze cues and were uninfluenced by the self-construal primes. However, East Asian Canadians (Study 2), who have cultural backgrounds relevant to both independence and interdependence, showed different attention patterns by prime: those primed with interdependence were more distracted by mismatched (vs. matched) background gaze cues, whereas there was no change for those primed with independence. These findings suggest activating an interdependent self-construal modulates social attention mechanisms to attend broadly, but only for those who may find these representations meaningful.

Does Context Matter? Effects of Robot Appearance and Reliability on Social Attention Differs Based on Lifelikeness of Gaze Task

Social signals, such as changes in gaze direction, are essential cues to predict others’ mental states and behaviors (i.e., mentalizing). Studies show that humans can mentalize with nonhuman agents when they perceive a mind in them (i.e., mind perception). Robots that physically and/or behaviorally resemble humans likely trigger mind perception, which enhances the relevance of social cues and improves social-cognitive performance. The current experiments examine whether the effect of physical and behavioral influencers of mind perception on social-cognitive processing is modulated by the lifelikeness of a social interaction. Participants interacted with robots of varying degrees of physical (humanlike vs. robot-like) and behavioral (reliable vs. random) human-likeness while the lifelikeness of a social attention task was manipulated across five experiments. The first four experiments manipulated lifelikeness via the physical realism of the robot images (Study 1 and 2), the biological plausibility of the social signals (Study 3), and the plausibility of the social context (Study 4). They showed that humanlike behavior affected social attention whereas appearance affected mind perception ratings. However, when the lifelikeness of the interaction was increased by using videos of a human and a robot sending the social cues in a realistic environment (Study 5), social attention mechanisms were affected both by physical appearance and behavioral features, while mind perception ratings were mainly affected by physical appearance. This indicates that in order to understand the effect of physical and behavioral features on social cognition, paradigms should be used that adequately simulate the lifelikeness of social interactions.

Brain stimulation to left prefrontal cortex modulates attentional orienting to gaze cues.

In social interactions, we rely on non-verbal cues like gaze direction to understand the behaviour of others. How we react to these cues is determined by the degree to which we believe that they originate from an entity with a mind capable of having internal states and showing intentional behaviour, a process called mind perception. While prior work has established a set of neural regions linked to mind perception, research has just begun to examine how mind perception affects social-cognitive mechanisms like gaze processing on a neuronal level. In the current experiment, participants performed a social attention task (i.e. attentional orienting to gaze cues) with either a human or a robot agent (i.e. manipulation of mind perception) while transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) was applied to prefrontal and temporo-parietal brain areas. The results show that temporo-parietal stimulation did not modulate mechanisms of social attention, neither in response to the human nor in response to the robot agent, whereas prefrontal stimulation enhanced attentional orienting in response to human gaze cues and attenuated attentional orienting in response to robot gaze cues. The findings suggest that mind perception modulates low-level mechanisms of social cognition via prefrontal structures, and that a certain degree of mind perception is essential in order for prefrontal stimulation to affect mechanisms of social attention. This article is part of the theme issue 'From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human-robot interaction'.

Attentional Selection of Social Features Persists Despite Restricted Bottom-Up Information and Affects Temporal Viewing Dynamics

Previous studies have shown an attentional bias towards social features during free-viewing of naturalistic scenes. This social attention seems to be reflexive and able to defy top-down demands in form of explicit search tasks. However, the question remains whether social features continue to be prioritized when peripheral information is limited, thereby reducing the influence of bottom-up image information on gaze orienting. Therefore, we established a gaze-contingent viewing paradigm, in which the visual field was constrained and updated in response to the viewer’s eye movements. Participants viewed social and non-social images that were randomly allocated to a free and a gaze-contingent viewing condition while their eye movements were tracked. Our results revealed a strong attentional bias towards social features in both conditions. However, gaze-contingent viewing altered temporal and spatial dynamics of viewing behavior. Additionally, recurrent fixations were more frequent and closer together in time for social compared to non-social stimuli in both viewing conditions. Taken together, this study implies a predominant selection of social features when bottom-up influences are diminished and a general influence of social content on visual exploratory behavior, thus highlighting mechanisms of social attention.

Effects of embodiment on social attention mechanisms in human-robot interaction

Effects of embodiment on social attention mechanisms in human-robot interaction

Perceived robot personality affects social attention in real-time human-robot interaction

Perceived robot personality affects social attention in real-time human-robot interaction

Spontaneous gaze selection and following during naturalistic social interactions in school-aged children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder.

Using a novel naturalistic paradigm allowing participants the freedom to spontaneously select and follow gaze cues in their environment, this study extends previous research conducted with younger children to determine whether school-age children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD, n = 17) demonstrate abnormal gaze following relative to typically developing (TD, n = 15) children. The participant and experimenter played a series of games, during which the experimenter pseudorandomly averted her gaze toward a social target (person) or a nonsocial target (object). A significant finding was that, relative to TD children, children with ASD were slower to follow the experimenter's gaze relative to the start of the trial (social targets d = -.93 [-1.70, -.16], nonsocial targets d = -1.05 [-1.88, -.20]). When we analyzed the duration of glances to the experimenter, we found that the ASD group made longer glances relative to TD children, but only in the nonsocial target condition (social targets d = .01 [-.68, .71], nonsocial targets d = -.81 [-1.53, -.08]). Other analyses revealed patterns of gaze selection and following that may help interpret the main findings. Despite the differences in the timing of gaze selection and following, the most common type of responder in both groups was one who followed the experimenter's gaze on over half of the trials. This pattern of results argues against a clear deficit in social attention in school-age children with ASD and underscores the importance of measuring both the timing of distinct mechanisms of social attention and the context in which these behaviors occur. (PsycINFO Database Record

Social attention in children with epilepsy

Children with epilepsy may be vulnerable to impaired social attention given the increased risk of neurobehavioural comorbidities. Social attentional orienting and the potential modulatory role of attentional control on the perceptual processing of gaze and emotion cues have not been examined in childhood onset epilepsies. Social attention mechanisms were investigated in patients with epilepsy (n=25) aged 8–18years old and performance compared to healthy controls (n=30). Dynamic gaze and emotion facial stimuli were integrated into an antisaccade eye-tracking paradigm. The time to orient attention and execute a horizontal saccade toward (prosaccade) or away (antisaccade) from a peripheral target measured processing speed of social signals under conditions of low or high attentional control. Patients with epilepsy had impaired processing speed compared to healthy controls under conditions of high attentional control only when gaze and emotions were combined meaningfully to signal motivational intent of approach (happy or anger with a direct gaze) or avoidance (fear or sad with an averted gaze). Group differences were larger in older adolescent patients. Analyses of the discrete gaze emotion combinations found independent effects of epilepsy-related, cognitive and behavioural problems. A delayed disengagement from fearful gaze was also found under low attentional control that was linked to epilepsy developmental factors and was similarly observed in patients with higher reported anxiety problems. Overall, findings indicate increased perceptual processing of developmentally relevant social motivations during increased cognitive control, and the possibility of a persistent fear-related attentional bias. This was not limited to patients with chronic epilepsy, lower IQ or reported behavioural problems and has implications for social and emotional development in individuals with childhood onset epilepsies beyond remission.

Developmental differences in cognitive control of social information

AbstractWe investigated developmental differences in the ability to exert cognitive control in the context of distracting spatial cues varying in social significance. Adults and children (6–13 years) were asked to classify target words (LEFT/RIGHT) that were accompanied by a distracter arrow or averted gaze pointing in a direction that was congruent, incongruent, or neutral (bar without arrowheads, central gaze) relative to the target word. Results showed that interference from averted eye‐gaze differed between adults and children indicating that cognitive control of social information improves with age. These age differences did not generalize to the interference effect from arrows. On the basis of these findings, it was concluded that adults are better at inhibiting and/or to ignore another person's distracting gaze than are children.Highlights We examined the developmental differences in the ability to exert cognitive control on social and non‐social directional information Evidence of age‐related differences in the inhibitory control of attention was only observed with social eye‐gaze distracters Inhibitory mechanisms of social attention continue to improve along development

Attentional biases and memory for emotional stimuli in men and male rhesus monkeys

We examined attentional biases for social and non-social emotional stimuli in young adult men and compared the results to those of male rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) previously tested in a similar dot-probe task (King et al. in Psychoneuroendocrinology 37(3):396-409, 2012). Recognition memory for these stimuli was also analyzed in each species, using a recognition memory task in humans and a delayed non-matching-to-sample task in monkeys. We found that both humans and monkeys displayed a similar pattern of attentional biases toward threatening facial expressions of conspecifics. The bias was significant in monkeys and of marginal significance in humans. In addition, humans, but not monkeys, exhibited an attentional bias away from negative non-social images. Attentional biases for social and non-social threat differed significantly, with both species showing a pattern of vigilance toward negative social images and avoidance of negative non-social images. Positive stimuli did not elicit significant attentional biases for either species. In humans, emotional content facilitated the recognition of non-social images, but no effect of emotion was found for the recognition of social images. Recognition accuracy was not affected by emotion in monkeys, but response times were faster for negative relative to positive images. Altogether, these results suggest shared mechanisms of social attention in humans and monkeys, with both species showing a pattern of selective attention toward threatening faces of conspecifics. These data are consistent with the view that selective vigilance to social threat is the result of evolutionary constraints. Yet, selective attention to threat was weaker in humans than in monkeys, suggesting that regulatory mechanisms enable non-anxious humans to reduce sensitivity to social threat in this paradigm, likely through enhanced prefrontal control and reduced amygdala activation. In addition, the findings emphasize important differences in attentional biases to social versus non-social threat in both species. Differences in the impact of emotional stimuli on recognition memory between monkeys and humans will require further study, as methodological differences in the recognition tasks may have affected the results.

I See What You Mean: How Attentional Selection Is Shaped by Ascribing Intentions to Others

The ability to understand and predict others’ behavior is essential for successful interactions. When making predictions about what other humans will do, we treat them as intentional systems and adopt the intentional stance, i.e., refer to their mental states such as desires and intentions. In the present experiments, we investigated whether the mere belief that the observed agent is an intentional system influences basic social attention mechanisms. We presented pictures of a human and a robot face in a gaze cuing paradigm and manipulated the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance by instruction: in some conditions, participants were told that they were observing a human or a robot, in others, that they were observing a human-like mannequin or a robot whose eyes were controlled by a human. In conditions in which participants were made to believe they were observing human behavior (intentional stance likely) gaze cuing effects were significantly larger as compared to conditions when adopting the intentional stance was less likely. This effect was independent of whether a human or a robot face was presented. Therefore, we conclude that adopting the intentional stance when observing others’ behavior fundamentally influences basic mechanisms of social attention. The present results provide striking evidence that high-level cognitive processes, such as beliefs, modulate bottom-up mechanisms of attentional selection in a top-down manner.

Reflexive Social Attention in Monkeys and Humans

For humans, social cues often guide the focus of attention. Although many nonhuman primates, like humans, live in large, complex social groups, the extent to which human and nonhuman primates share fundamental mechanisms of social attention remains unexplored. Here, we show that, when viewing a rhesus macaque looking in a particular direction, both rhesus macaques and humans reflexively and covertly orient their attention in the same direction. Specifically, when performing a peripheral visual target detection task, viewing a monkey with either its eyes alone or with both its head and eyes averted to one side facilitated the detection of peripheral targets when they randomly appeared on the same side. Moreover, viewing images of a monkey with averted gaze evoked small but systematic shifts in eye position in the direction of gaze in the image. The similar magnitude and temporal dynamics of response facilitation and eye deviation in monkeys and humans suggest shared neural circuitry mediating social attention.