How attention gates social interactions

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Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. ISSN 0077-8923

A N N A L S O F T H E N E W Y O R K A C A D E M Y O F SC I E N C E S Special Issue: The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience REVIEW

How attention gates social interactions Francesca Capozzi

and Jelena Ristic

Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Address for correspondence: Francesca Capozzi, Department of Psychology, McGill University, 2001 McGill College Avenue, Montreal, QC H3A 1G1, Canada. [email protected]; Jelena Ristic, Department of Psychology, McGill University, 2001 McGill College Avenue, Montreal, QC, H3A 1G1, Canada. [email protected]

Social interactions are at the core of social life. However, humans selectively choose their exchange partners and do not engage in all available opportunities for social encounters. In this review, we argue that attentional systems play an important role in guiding the selection of social interactions. Supported by both classic and emerging literature, we identify and characterize the three core processes—perception, interpretation, and evaluation—that interact with attentional systems to modulate selective responses to social environments. Perceptual processes facilitate attentional prioritization of social cues. Interpretative processes link attention with understanding of cues’ social meanings and agents’ mental states. Evaluative processes determine the perceived value of the source of social information. The interplay between attention and these three routes of processing places attention in a powerful role to manage the selection of the vast amount of social information that individuals encounter on a daily basis and, in turn, gate the selection of social interactions. Keywords: social attention; attentional selection; social perception; mentalizing; socio-evaluative processes

Introduction A single social encounter has the power to change a life forever. To illustrate, consider an example from the 1998 romantic comedy Sliding Doors, in which the main protagonists Helen and John, previously unacquainted due to multiple twists of fate, meet for the first time in an elevator at the end of the movie. As their eyes lock and sparks fly, the scene stays still on this forever-love connection. Even though movies illustrate reality through a director’s lens, they strive to bring the core features of human life to the fore. Social interactions are one of those core features. Many of our daily situations present numerous potentials for social interactions. Whether in an elevator, caf´e, or metro, we continuously encounter other people. However, we do not engage in social interactions indiscriminately. Instead, we choose social exchanges based on a multitude of factors including context, familiarity, interest, or availability. What cognitive and social processes guide the selection of social interactions? In this article, we argue that one of the main functions of the human attention system is to aid

the selection and management of the abundant social cues in the environment and, in turn, gate the choice of our social interactions. At a basic level, social exchanges involve detection and selection of social affordances, or ostensive and communicative signals displayed by other humans that offer opportunities for social interactions.1 Social affordances are often conveyed by nonverbal signals, like gaze or gestures. Our responses to those affordances often also occur nonverbally. They are reflected by the wide range of flexible attentional and looking behaviors that are engaged by social cues.2 For example, reciprocating someone’s gaze may signal social interest, creating an opportunity for an interaction. In contrast, looking away may signal an absence of social interest, ending an opportunity for an interaction.3 Importantly, attentional responses to social affordances do not occur in an all-or-none fashion. Instead, they are dynamically modulated by multiple cognitive and social factors, such as agents’ familiarity, intentions, or social status. Consequently, the engagement and control of attentional behaviors in social

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environments depend on a dynamic interplay between the underlying perceptual, interpretive, and evaluative processes that mediate across the levels of cognitive and social analyses. In the following discussion, we identify and characterize how each of these three routes of processes contributes to attentional behaviors in social contexts and outline a way by which each route may furnish the selection and management of available social information. We begin with a historical overview of the major developments in the field of social attention, an area of study that investigates attentional behaviors in social environments. The purpose of this section is to outline both the classical approaches as well as the recent methodological and theoretical advances that have begun to reveal the multifaceted nature of social attention. Then, synthesizing this emerging work, we define and characterize each of the three proposed routes of processing—perceptual, interpretive, and evaluative operations—that support the flexibility of human social attention behaviors. Across these sections, we show that perception of social affordances engages attentional responses that prioritize social over nonsocial environmental cues, but that the strength and maintenance of those responses is modulated by the interpretation of others’ mental states and the evaluation of the source of the social information. Integrating this evidence, at the end we outline a reconceptualized view of social attention as a heterogeneous ability with a main functional role in the management and prioritization of social cues and selection of social interactions. A brief history and the current state of the field Social attention is often understood to reflect changes in attentional behavior that occur in response to information conveyed by other people.4 This umbrella term is typically used to reflect both the processes involved in attentional engagement by social stimuli (e.g., attending to others’ faces and/or bodies)5 and those implicated in orienting of attention toward objects that align with directional signals conveyed by other people (e.g., their gaze direction, pointing gestures, and body orientation).6 In everyday life, engagement and orienting often intertwine dynamically,7 as evidenced, for example, by infants’ social referencing behaviors alternating between objects and mother-directed 2

gaze,8 or those demonstrated by adult partnerobject gaze coordination during conversations.9 Here, we use the term social attention as inclusive of both engagement and orienting processes. Additionally, to capture a range of resulting social attention operations, we use the term attentional behavior in its broad sense to convey measurable and/or observable changes in attentional states or underlying functions, including task performance, looking, and orienting. Most of the work within the field has so far focused on characterizing attentional behaviors elicited in response to cues like faces and eyes, as these convey a wide range of sociocommunicative messages such as others’ attentional focus,10 intentions,11 and emotional states.12 Our review here reflects this focus in the field. Contemporary social attention draws on methodologies established by developmental researchers in the 1970s, when investigators first started examining how children respond to nonverbal social communicative cues in interactive settings. In a typical investigation, after an infant–caregiver interaction, using videotaped playback, researchers would measure an infant’s propensity to follow caregiver’s gaze toward objects in the environment.13 In the late 1990s, this observer-coded methodology was largely replaced by objective measures, such as response time, response accuracy, and characteristics of eye movements measured using eye tracking equipment. At that time, several research groups independently began utilizing the so-called gaze-cuing task, which manipulates gaze direction signals in a laboratory procedure and measures the resultant gaze-following behavior.14–16 Figure 1A illustrates the classic version of this task. At the beginning of each trial, a schematic image of a face is presented at the center of the screen. Then, pupils, typically averted toward left or right, appear within the face to indicate a gaze shift. Finally, a peripheral target, demanding a speeded response, is presented either at the gazed-at location or at the not gazed-at location. Despite the fact that the gaze shift remains task-irrelevant because it is spatially nonpredictive, or even counterpredictive of the location of the upcoming target, participants are reliably faster to respond to targets appearing at gazed-at relative to not gazed-at locations.17,18 This general finding has so far been replicated numerous times and is interpreted as indicating that others’ gazes elicit spontaneous orienting of attention toward

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Figure 1. Example paradigms used in social attention research. (A) The gaze-cuing task. After a fixation cross (typically presented between 500 and 800 ms), a blank face with no gaze information is shown (for 600–1500 ms). Then, averted pupils are presented indicating a lateral eye gaze shift. After a varying time (100–1000 ms), a target (the letter “F” in this example), appears, demanding a manual or oculomotor response. On validly cued trials, the target appears in the peripheral location cued by gaze direction. On invalidly cued trials (depicted here), the target appears in a peripheral location not cued by gaze direction. (B) The dot-perspective task. After the presentation of a fixation cross (500–750 ms), either the word “You” or “Avatar” is presented (typically for 750 ms), instructing the participant to either adopt their own perspective or the avatar’s perspective. Then, a digit (0–3) is shown (750–1000 ms). Finally, the picture of a room appears with an avatar “looking” at a number of objects. Participants are asked to indicate, with a speeded manual response, whether the previously presented digit matches the number of objects that were visible in the target image from the instructed perspective. On perspective-consistent trials, the participant and the avatar “see” the same number of objects. On perspective-inconsistent trials (depicted here), the participant and the avatar “see” a different number of objects. (C) Adapted gaze-cuing procedure for gaze-induced object desirability. A realistic photograph of a face is presented, and a realistic image of an object (a green mug) depicts a response target. The task follows the standard gaze-cuing sequence, except in the final block of trials where participants are asked to rate the likability of each target object using a slider scale running from 1 (not liked at all) to 9 (liked very much). (D) Real-world setting (from Ref. 40). Participant and a confederate are seated in a room together (D.1). The confederate initiates a short conversation, typically by asking about mundane issues. The interaction is captured both by an overall scene view camera and by a camera positioned within the eyeglasses frames worn by the confederate (highlighted in D.2). The duration of direct eye contact (i.e., attentional engagement; D.3) and the frequency of gaze following responses (i.e., attentional shifting; D.4) are extracted and analyzed.

gazed-at locations.19 To date, the gaze-cuing task remains one of the most used experimental paradigms for studying social attention. Recently, a new task has been developed to assess the role of higher level social processes such as visuospatial perspective taking.20 In the dot-perspective

task, illustrated in Figure 1B, an image of a human avatar is presented, standing in full profile at the center of a room. One or several objects (e.g., colored dots) are shown on the room’s walls, with their placement either consistent or inconsistent with the avatar’s point of view. Participants are asked

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to report the number of objects that are visible on the room’s walls from their own perspective or from the avatar’s perspective. Despite the fact that avatar’s gaze and body orientation remain task irrelevant, when participants are asked to respond from their own perspective, they are faster to respond on trials in which the avatar “sees” the same number of objects as the participant (i.e., perspectiveconsistent trials), relative to trials in which the avatar “sees” a different number of objects than the participant (i.e., perspective-inconsistent trials). This result has been interpreted as reflecting an interference of the spontaneous calculation of others’ perspectives with the calculation of one’s own perspective.21,22 Although generating a wealth of data and a surge in interest across multiple domains of inquiry,23–25 this predominantly laboratory-based approach also generated a few hypothesis-inconsistent results.6 Two are particularly worth highlighting. The first refers to findings indicating equivalent attentional effects elicited by social directional cues, like gaze, and nonsocial directional cues, like arrows,26–28 which questions the purported unique advantage of social cues in engaging human attention. The second refers to findings from investigations carried out with individuals with autism spectrum disorder,29 which is characterized by a core impairment in social function. These results indicated that more often than not persons with autism displayed normative face processing and social attention orienting behaviors,30–32 challenging the notion that the classic experimental tests measure the involvement of underlying social processes.33 It has been argued that these hypothesisinconsistent results may reflect the artificiality of the experimental procedures that were used to engage social attention.6 In turn, in recent years, researchers started developing novel approaches showcasing increasing ecological validity. This involved both modifying the existing laboratory manipulations34 as well as studying social attention during real-life naturalistic situations.35 To increase ecological validity in the laboratory, researchers began to manipulate more lifelike stimuli, such as images of real faces, and began to increase the social nature of the experimental manipulations. For example, Bayliss and colleagues adapted the gaze-cuing task to investigate the extent to which gaze direction may be interpreted as conveying 4

intentions.36 Figure 1C shows an example of their procedure, in which participants were asked to score how much they liked the target objects at the end of a gaze-cuing procedure. In addition to the classic gaze-following effect, the results also indicated that the gaze cue was interpreted as an intentional cue that signals desire or interest and affects later object desirability, as participants reported more appreciation for objects that were gazed-at relative to those that were not gazed-at. Others increased the social nature of the manipulations by investigating the role of factors related to the social identity, such as person familiarity37 or their social status.38 For example, Jones and colleagues38 utilized the gaze-cuing procedure to examine the effects of social dominance on gaze followed by manipulating either a dominant-looking (e.g., strongly masculinized) or a nondominant-looking (e.g., strongly feminized) face within the classic gaze-cuing procedure. The results showed increased gaze following for dominant, relative to nondominant, faces, suggesting that gaze-following behavior is also affected by socioevaluative processes, like perceived authority.38 Occurring in parallel, the work that started to examine social attention in real-world settings revealed additional varieties of social attention behaviors. For example, showing the power of a potential for social interaction, Laidlaw and colleagues demonstrated that participants looked more at the face of a person who was shown on a video screen compared with the face of a live confederate who was sitting in the same room as the participant.39 Similarly, Hayward and colleagues measured participants’ gaze following during a reallife natural conversation (Fig. 1D) and found that in this naturalistic situation participants followed the confederate’s gaze less often than would be predicted from their performance in the gaze-cuing task.40 Thus, increasing the ecological validity of the testing procedures yielded results that were previously not captured by tasks using simplified stimuli, revealing the importance of contextual and situational factors in social attention.40,41 However, while opening new and exciting research avenues, these approaches also contributed to the creation of several ongoing dialogues advocating for different functional explanations and methodological styles. For example, investigations that have examined the role of attention in visuospatial perspective–taking have argued that the

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interference from others’ perspectives, measured by the dot-perspective task, may be due to domaingeneral processing of cue directionality rather than social processes involved in mental state attribution (i.e., knowledge that the agent sees).42 Other discussions, focusing on methodological issues, have argued in favor of real-life over laboratory tests based on the observation that social attention behaviors typically measured in the classic laboratory settings become infrequent, or even absent, in real-world scenarios.43 The practical consequence of this expansion has been relatively little progress toward an integrated understanding of the mechanisms that support both typical and atypical social attention. Most importantly, the large amount of available evidence has not yielded an increased understanding of the functional role of attention in human social life. Our reading of this large literature paints a more optimistic picture. When we reviewed the evidence emerging from all research facets together, a unified perspective on social attention began to emerge. As we show next, this evidence converges to characterize social attention as a flexible and heterogeneous ability that requires the contribution of perceptual, interpretive, and evaluative operations. Perceptual processes enable the “reading” of social signals from the environment (e.g., gaze direction) and gate further social analyses. Interpretive operations enable decoding of intentions and mental states in others (e.g., an agent sees). Evaluative processes reflect the modulating effects of personal and contextual factors (e.g., a specific agent who delivers relevant information). When the contribution of each of these processes is considered in concert with attentional abilities, social attention emerges as a complex, yet efficient, system with a main purpose to manage and select available social cues and resulting social interactions. The three core processes The classic understanding of social attention is based on its most basic manifestation—an attentional function that is spontaneously engaged by social cues. Recent work, however, paints a more nuanced picture, showing that social attention is modulated not only by perceptual processes that facilitate processing of social cues, but also by higher level interpretive and evaluative processes, which act to modify the relevance of perceived cues and to

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diversify the resulting repertoire of social attention responses. Specifically, perceptual processes enable the computation and analyses of social affordances, such as gaze direction or face configuration. Interpretive processes are guided by the attribution of mental states to those identified as social agents and reflect the combination of ascribed mental states and contextual factors—that is, an understanding of what an agent is doing based on their intentions in the environment.44 Evaluative processes furnish identity-based attribution of traits and/or qualities45 and reflect the value assigned to a specific source of social information—that is, an understanding that a particular agent delivers important information. Perceptual processes To a human observer, nonverbal social cues displayed by other people (e.g., gaze, facial expressions, gestures, and body posture) represent social and communicative affordances that facilitate social interactions.1,46 Due to their importance, it is thus not surprising that social affordances spontaneously engage attention. And although social affordances often require additional interpretive functions to reveal their full sociocommunicative potential,47 cues with social connotation appear to be preferentially processed by the perceptual and attentional systems.48–50 This general priority is understood to reflect evolutionary adaptations driven by the intrinsic importance of social stimuli for survival and social wellbeing,51,52 with atypical patterns often associated with the development of social dysfunctions, such as autism.53 Additionally, within this processing priority, signals conveyed by eyes in particular appear to be most socially salient, as information delivered by this subtle yet powerful cue is prioritized even over physically larger cues, such as head and body orientation.10,54–57 Given this, it was reasonable to hypothesize that prioritized access and processing of social affordances would engage a specialized attention system dedicated for responding to social cues, particularly eyes.58 However, this hypothesis predicts that manipulating gaze direction in experimental tasks would result in unique behavioral and neural effects when compared with nonsocial stimuli. This is not what the evidence shows. Instead, research has repeatedly indicated indistinguishable attentional

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effects elicited by social (i.e., gaze direction) and nonsocial (e.g., arrows) stimuli both in the classic gaze-cuing procedure26–28 and in the more recent dot-perspective task.59 One of the first demonstrations of this result was reported by Ristic and colleagues, who found that both preschool age children as well as adults produced the same equivalent-orienting effects for gaze and arrow cues60 (see also, Ref. 26). More recently, Santiesteban and colleagues reported a similar finding using the dot-perspective task, in which the image of an arrow acted as central cue in the place of a human avatar. Their results indicated comparable interference effects in self-perspective processing in both the nonsocial-arrow and the social-avatar conditions.59 Equivalent attentional effects for social and nonsocial cues have also been reported at the neural level. Here, researchers have typically examined whether attentional orienting in response to social gaze and comparison nonsocial cues was associated with differential activations within the attentional control networks.61,62 These investigations have also frequently revealed similar neural activity for gaze and arrow cues,63–65 with disruptive transcranial magnetic stimulation over the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) found to modulate the processing of directional information regardless of the social (i.e., a human avatar) or nonsocial (i.e., an arrow) nature of the stimulus.66 Some work did show cue-specific modulation—for example results indicating that social, compared with nonsocial, cues elicit stronger67,68 and sometimes even unique69–71 effects in neural responses—are more effective in guiding infant object processing and learning,72,73 and drive behavioral effects that appear more resistant to volitional control.17,18,74,75 However, overall, the available evidence suggests that similar processes might be involved in attentional responses elicited by social and nonsocial cues. In other words, it appears that, like other attention-relevant stimuli, social cues also access and engage domain-general attentional processes. However, due to specialized perceptual processing of social information within the human brain, social signals appear to access these domain-general attentional processes in a way that affords additional interpretive and socio-evaluative operations. It is well known that the processing and analysis of faces and facial features involves a largely right-lateralized and distributed neural network 6

that includes both subcortical and cortical structures, such as the amygdala, superior temporal sulcus (STS), fusiform gyrus, limbic system, as well as some prefrontal areas.76,77 Consequently, the detection of social affordances becomes intimately tied with analyses occurring within this social perception network, which, by the virtue of its links with higher level systems for social processing,78–80 appears to facilitate the initial perception of social cues, their attentional processing, and subsequent social analyses that enable the integration of the perceptual information with cues’ social meanings. The associations between attentional and social perceptual systems have been demonstrated in both behavioral and neuroimaging work. Regarding the former, Bayliss and colleagues reported that perceptual adaptation, uniquely elicited by prolonged exposure to averted gaze, reduces the subsequent magnitude of attentional orienting elicited by gaze direction.81 Neurally, perception of averted and direct gaze has been shown to be modulated by an increased activity in regions such as the STS82 and the amygdala,83,84 and is associated with distinctive markers in electrocortical activity such as the early onset of the face-selective N170 component.85 The activity in the face-selective perceptual network has also been shown to contribute to attentional engagement by gaze direction,85–88 with, for example, Marquardt and colleagues demonstrating the link between gaze-following and the activity in faceselective regions in the posterior STS and cortical regions dedicated to detecting and following objectdirected gaze.88 The links between socio-perceptual and socio-evaluative processes are exemplified by research showing that face perception systems efficiently integrate facial identity information with larger social factors related to computation of stereotypes, person knowledge, and expectations owing to context,89 whereas gaze information, body movement, and posture information have been found to instantaneously communicate others’ inner states, emotions, and object-related intentions.2,90–92 Thus, on a perceptual level, social attention appears to involve cross talk between domaingeneral attentional systems and specialized centers for social perception, as well links between social perception systems, interpretive, and socioevaluative operations. Consequently, this interactive structure allows attentional processes to both gate the preferential processing of social affordances at a

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perceptual level, as well as to furnish further analyses of their meaning at social levels. As we show next, interpretive and evaluative social analyses appear to modulate attentional operations by integrating the computation of social cues with the processing of agents’ mental states and their social identities. Interpretive processes By definition, human social interactions involve other people. The fundamental difference between people and objects is that people have minds while objects do not. Ample evidence supports the notion that social interactions are facilitated by the human ability to “read” or understand others’ minds, often referred to as mindreading or mentalizing abilities. Mentalizing supports a number of behaviors, from the basic attribution of a mind to identity of more complex interpretations of intentionality or desire.20 Importantly, recent evidence also supports the notion that social attention behaviors are affected by mentalizing processes that facilitate the interpretation of the social meaning of available cues. Two general types of studies support this notion. The first line of work demonstrates the links between social attention and mind–gaze associations, or the knowledge that the other agents “see” the environment. The second line of work highlights the links between social attention and selfreferential processes, or the knowledge of beingthe-object-of others’ attention. We review each in turn. Mind–gaze associations modulate social attention reliably. In particular, studies show that the magnitude of gaze following becomes reduced when gaze cues are perceived as belonging to a nonhuman and when the human’s line of sight is obstructed. For example, Wiese et al. demonstrated reduced gaze following when gaze cues were perceived as being delivered by a robot (e.g., a computer program performing predetermined behaviors) rather than a human agent.93,94 These effects are reflected in neural activity, with increased activation of the TPJ when gaze is perceived as human controlled,95 and reduced magnitudes of the event-related P196 and N17097 components when gaze is perceived as computer controlled. Consistently, socialattentional behaviors also appear to be contingent on the agent’s ability to unobstructively see their environment. Both laboratory and real-world studies show that the

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spontaneous orienting toward an inferred agent’s mental perspective is modulated by the perceived ability of the agent to see the available objects, with reduced and even abolished orienting when the agent’s line of sight is occluded.98,99 Further, others’ ability to see the environment also appears to be important for determining the extent to which a gaze cue is interpreted as conveying intentional gaze–object relationships, with attentional responses to social cues being reduced when those relationships are absent or weakened.100 As a consequence, gaze cues directed toward occluded objects are often interpreted as not conveying social meaning, with the observer ceasing to experience typical gaze-induced object preferences.101,102 This behavior may be explained by the attribution of an intention to attend to specific objects, as, for example, nonsocial arrow cues have been shown to elicit a general location bias toward parts of the environment, while gaze cues have been shown to elicit spatial-orienting effects toward a specific object location.103 Consistent with this hypothesis, PerezOsorio and colleagues reported that gaze-following behaviors became reduced when gaze direction violated context-driven expectations regarding an agent’s action toward available objects.104 Together, these studies show that the social meaning of cues is dampened when an observer’s gaze is perceived as coming from a nonhuman, as well as when the human agent’s gaze is perceived as not meaningfully object directed. Thus, interpreting social cues as revealing of the agent’s intentions within the environment is key for strengthening and often determining the resulting social attention behaviors. This suggests that humans understand gaze information as delivering a meaningful social signal only when it conveys intentional mental states of another agent. Similar to the knowledge that another agent is able to see their environment, responses to social cues are also reliably modulated by the knowledge or belief of being the object of others’ attention. Direct gaze, for example, is a powerful cue that often signals the intention to communicate.105 In turn, faces displaying direct gaze are reported to attract attention to a greater extent and more rapidly compared with faces displaying averted gaze,106 with this effect persisting even when faces are presented subliminally.107 Both behavioral and neuroimaging studies show that

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establishing108 and interrupting109 eye contact with an observer modulates attentional engagement based on the social meaning of gaze. For example, B¨ockler and colleagues demonstrated that faces displaying direct gaze attract attention faster and more reliably than faces looking elsewhere, with this effect being consistent with the subjective experience of establishing prior eye contact.108 Correspondingly, using intracranial electrocortical recordings, Caruana and colleagues have reported that viewing faces with averting gaze from central to lateral position was associated with an increased activity in the posterior STS, coding for the social meaning of gaze and the subjective experience of interrupted eye contact.109 The communicative intent of direct gaze has also been found to modulate gaze following. Senju and Csibra demonstrated that infants’ gaze following was contingent on first establishing direct eye contact, which presumably serves to enhance the infant’s attentional engagement and signal an upcoming social interaction.110 B¨ockler and colleagues have reported similar findings in adults. They adapted the gaze-cuing procedure so that participants saw two agents either looking at each other or looking away from each other before displaying consistent gaze shifts, that is, looking in the same direction. Their results indicated increased gaze following on trials in which the agents previously looked at each other relative to trials in which they previously looked away from each other.111,112 Thus, direct eye contact is interpreted as an ostensive signal that highlights the meaning of the upcoming social action, and serves to augment the processing of others’ gaze cues. Emphasizing the importance of interpretive processes in dynamic interactive contexts, the effects of others’ gazes on attention have also been found to be affected by the knowledge or belief of being looked back at.113–115 This finding is consistent with the notion of a dual function of gaze, which proposes that humans both interpret available social cues and simultaneously communicate social cues to others.5 The dual function of gaze is particularly evident in real-life situations, like naturalistic social exchanges in which partners use reciprocal communicative gaze signals to structure their interactions.116–118 The knowledge of being looked back at has been reported to reduce overt attentional engagement and subsequent gaze fol8

lowing, presumably in order to prevent undesired social interactions in the absence of social interest.39 For example, in an investigation of gaze following in real-life crowded settings, Gallup and colleagues reported that people more readily followed social cues of pedestrians who were not able to look back at them because they were walking in the same direction in front of them, compared with pedestrians who were able to look at them directly because they were walking toward them in the opposite direction.119,120 Mutual gaze behaviors have also been found to affect interactions positively, eliciting greater attentional engagement in response to interactive relative to noninteractive identities, with this engagement associated with reward and mindreading brain activations.121,122 For example, Edwards and colleagues implemented a procedure in which participants, initially looking a central object placed among multiple faces, had the impression that some of the faces were following their gaze direction (i.e., looking at the same object as the participant) and others were not. Highlighting the importance of mutual engagement, their results indicated greater attentional engagement for faces that followed the observer’s gaze relative to those that did not.123 These findings dovetail well with work conducted on the topic of shared attention, which has demonstrated the benefits of joint attention in a variety of situations, including interpersonal influences124 and joint perception,125 and, as a result, might reflect a form of social tuning, whereby people spontaneously align with social partners who are believed to share the same experience of the world.126 Thus, social attentional responses are modulated by the extent to which social cues are interpreted as self-relevant and conveying a communicative, interactive intent. To summarize, social attention is fundamentally modulated by interpretive operations that allow understanding of other people’s minds and intentions. The range of these operations contributes to the flexibility of social attention responses that occur within ongoing or planned social interactions. While these interpretive processes act upon the attribution of mental states to determine the social and interactive meaning of perceived social cues, evaluative processes, which we review next, introduce additional modulatory functions related to the identity of an agent in order to

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prioritize some sources of social information over others. Evaluative processes Social interactions change depending on social partners, as interacting with close friends, for example, is not the same as interacting with strangers, bosses, or teachers. Socio-evaluative processes support identity-based comparisons between agents and allow for situationally and contextually appropriate modulation of the resulting social behavior.45 Socio-evaluative processes have recently come to the fore of the social attention literature, with data indicating that these processes diversify social attention behaviors by dynamically weighing the perceived importance of available social cues based on the identity of the agent who is delivering them. Two general lines of research support this notion. One shows the links between social attention and social status. The other highlights the relationship between social attention and social affiliation. We review each line in turn. Social status refers to the perceived position of an individual within an explicit or implicit social hierarchy.127 Perception of social status has a profound impact on social attention. For example, it has been theorized that the dynamics of looking behaviors during real-life interactions represent a tacit marker of group social processes, as both nonhuman primates128 and human observers viewing video recordings of group interactions129,130 look more at high-status individuals (i.e., leaders) relative to low-status individuals (i.e., nonleaders). Capozzi and colleagues tested this intuition during real-life group interactions and found that group leaders could be reliably identified based on the dynamics of group-looking behaviors, as they were looked at more and engaged in more mutual gaze episodes relative to other group members.131,132 Extending this work, Capozzi and Ristic133 recently found that such implicit social dynamics reliably influenced subsequent social behaviors, with the amount of time one was being looked at during a group interaction predicting the magnitude of gaze following elicited by their gaze cues in subsequent encounters. Electrocortical data provide further support for the notion that high-status individuals engage attention more, as compared with low-status individuals.134–136 As an example of this work, Santamaria-Garcia and colleagues developed a

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paradigm for simulating social hierarchies in which participants were asked to perform a task either with another player who was performing the task better than the participant or a with player who was performing the task worse than the participant. Analyses revealed larger amplitudes of the face-sensitive N170 component when participants were presented with a picture of the superior player compared with being presented with a picture of an inferior player.134 Consistent with these results, studies have also reported greater gaze following for gaze cues displayed by high-status individuals, relative to gaze cues displayed by low-status individuals, using a wide array of social status manipulations, including physical dominance,137 professional prestige,138 political leadership,139 and leadership inferred from group dynamics.140 As outlined before, Jones and colleagues reported greater gaze following for dominant-looking faces relative to nondominant faces.38 Extending their work, Ohlsen and colleagues found that gaze cues of nondominant faces were particularly disregarded in the context of perceived emotional threat, obtained by priming participants with threatening images before the experiment.137 Dalmaso and colleagues demonstrated the influence of professional prestige on gaze following by having a gaze-cuing procedure preceded by the presentation of the curriculum vitae (CV) of individuals whose faces were used later as cuing stimuli. The results revealed greater gaze following in response to gaze of faces that were connected with high-profile CVs, compared with the gaze of faces connected with low-profile CVs.138,141 Liuzza and colleagues used faces of actual politicians to manipulate social status based on political leadership and found greater gaze following for politician’s gaze in supporters of their political party, with the magnitude of this effect enhanced by the voter’s preferences for social dominance hierarchy.139,142 Finally, Capozzi and colleagues used an adapted gaze–cuing procedure involving multiple faces, in which some individuals emerged as group leaders (i.e., they turned their gaze first and the other faces followed their gaze) and others as group followers (i.e., always following others’ gazes). When participants were later presented with a gaze-cuing task, in which either images of leaders’ or followers’ gazes served as cuing stimuli, they exhibited greater gaze following in response to gaze cues

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displayed by leaders relative to gaze cues displayed by followers.140 Together, these studies show that social attention depends on evaluative processes that act to prioritize social cues coming from certain agents over others based on their social status. The second line of research that shows the role of evaluative processes in social attention highlights the modulatory effects of social affiliation. Social affiliation refers to social belonging and includes processes that span from familiarity based on past interactions to group membership (i.e., the actual or perceived belonging to a social group).143 Group membership appears to be a particularly powerful modulator of social attention. Faces of in-group members attract more attention and their gaze is followed more reliably than faces of out-group members, with these effects reversed in circumstances of perceived intergroup threat.144–147 For example, Chen and colleagues manipulated group membership and perceived social threat based on racial and cultural factors and found that participants took more time to withdraw attention from gaze cues not looking at the target when they depicted threatening out-group faces relative to when they depicted nonthreatening in-group faces.147 Thus, responsiveness to social cues is modulated by the interactions between social affiliation and other social processes, such as intergroup threat.148 Social affiliation, however, may also arise from occasional encounters, e.g., gaze-based interactions, in which two individuals establish joint attention by looking at the same object. Research into this type of social affiliation has revealed that past history of social interactions modulates both the ongoing social interaction as well as later encounters. To examine this notion, Dalmaso and colleagues used a paradigm in which participants re-encountered identities that had either previously consistently followed their gaze or those that had not. Their findings indicated that the identities that are perceived as not responding to gaze signals elicit greater gaze following in later encounters compared with identities that are perceived as reliably responding to gaze signals, presumably because of an urgency to recover failed social connections.149 Furthermore, identities that have been perceived as displaying reliable gaze signals were judged as more trustworthy than those displaying unreliable gaze signals, and they elicited greater altruistic behaviors (e.g., giving) in subsequent encounters.150,151 Such 10

incidental learning of others’ social reliability and prosociality modulates the strength of gaze following, with greater responses elicited by gaze cues of reliable, relative to unreliable, faces, especially in high socially-competent observers152,153 (see also, Ref. 154). Thus, social affiliation also affects social attention and, along with social status, represents another dimension that supports the dynamic prioritization of social information based on agents’ identity and their social characteristics. Taken as a whole, the literature that has examined the links between evaluative processes and social attention shows that attentional responses change as a function of the social importance ascribed to a specific social source or an agent. In turn, these socio-evaluative operations serve to diversify the repertoire of social attention behaviors, allowing for the prioritization of social information from specific agents during social interactions. In summary, the heterogeneity of social attention behaviors appears to be modulated by the workings of three underlying core processes—perception, interpretation, and evaluation. Perceptual systems establish the social nature of stimuli and allow preferential attentional responding to available social affordances by the virtue of their access to attentional and social analysis systems. Interpretive processes, related to inferring agent’s intentionality and communicative states, add social meaning to cues and facilitate responding based on the extent to which social cues are perceived as self-relevant and meaningful regarding the environment. Finally, evaluative processes weigh the perceived value of the source of the available social information and modulate responses based on agents’ identity and the perceived importance of the information that they deliver. Figure 2 illustrates the three proposed routes of processing. The relationship between the three core processes Current evidence suggests that perceptual, interpretive, and evaluative processes operate in an independent but interacting manner. This notion is supported by the studies conducted with nonhuman primates, human infants, and clinical populations. Nonhuman primates, the closest phylogenetic relative to humans, display limited interpretive or mentalizing abilities but show sensitivity

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Figure 2. A schematic representation of perceptual, interpretive, and evaluative routes of processing.

to gaze direction and biological motion cues.25 A similar dissociation between perceptual and interpretive routes is evident in early human development. Until about 6 months of age, attentional responses to social stimuli in human infants are preferentially driven by changes in low-level visual features rather than cues’ social content.155,156 Between 6 months and 3–4 years of age, however, children’ attentional responses become more readily engaged by a sophisticated understanding of the social nature of environmental affordances, gaze–object intentional relationship, as well as an understanding of the communicative intent conveyed by eye contact, with these abilities maturing with the full development of mentalizing abilities around 4 years of age.4,20 Clinical evidence also supports dissociations between perceptual and interpretive analyses, as individuals with autism are often found to display relatively intact attentional responses to social stimuli like faces and facial features,33,157 but show altered sensitivity to the social function of those cues in signaling agents’ interest, desires, and/or intentions toward objects in the environment.112,158–161 In contrast, the links between attentional and evaluative processes are well preserved phylogenetically and appear to emerge early in human development. Nonhuman primates are highly proficient in socio-evaluative analyses with their attentional behaviors displaying increased engagement and orienting in response to high-status conspecifics, ingroup members, and social partners.162–165 Human infants as young as 4–9 months of age are also sensitive to similar social factors, exhibiting attentional behaviors that reflect expectations about high-status individuals,166,167 and showing early sensitivity to social affiliation.168,169 Taken together, this evidence might be interpreted as suggesting that perceptual, interpretive, and eval-

uative processes unfold sequentially, with perceptual processes initially driving social cue processing and enabling later higher level social analyses carried out by interpretive and evaluative operations. However, along with this possibility, available evidence also indicates several other possible directions of influence, which we review next. Studies conducted with clinical and typically developing populations show that perceptual processes affect social analyses and the resulting social functionality. Anatomically, individuals with autism have an increased number of connections within the primary visual cortex170,171 as well as a reduced connectivity between the primary cortex,172 extrastriate visual areas, and the frontal regions,173 with recent prospective longitudinal work indicating tight links between these structural differences and the severity of the emerging autism phenotype.173 Functionally, persons with autism also show reduced activation within the brain’s social perception network, with the fusiform gyrus displaying activity that is consistent with feature-based object processing rather than social cue processing.174 Typically developing individuals also stratify based on the sensitivity to perceptual information and social competence. Hayward and Ristic161 have recently demonstrated that individuals with high social competence preferentially orient their attention in response to social over visually distinct (e.g., motion and luminance) cues, while those with low social competence preferentially orient their attention in response to visually distinct cues over those with an a priori social value. Other evidence supports the influence of interpretive and evaluative operations in perceptual processes. Electrophysiological, behavioral, and neuroimaging work has demonstrated that perceptually ambiguous stimuli, which are initially perceived and processed as nonsocial objects, become

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perceived as socially relevant and processed within the brain’s social perception network when an appropriate social context is introduced.175–177 For example, in a classic study using electrocortical recordings, Bentin et al. reported that a pair of commas did not reliably elicit the classic face-specific N170 waveform until they were presented within a circle outline signaling a face contour.177 Another area of investigation that indicates a dynamic relationship between perceptual and interpretive processes relates to the effects of the emotional context, with evidence suggesting that interpretive operations, such as the detection of the emotionally consistent and contextually appropriate facial expressions, act to boost the power of emotionally arousing stimuli, like those signaling threat, in attracting attention.100,178 Additional evidence shows that perceptual analyses are also affected by socio-evaluative operations, whereby initially neutral visual stimuli become perceived as conveying socially relevant information after they have been imbued with social reward.154,179 Finally, there is also evidence for interactions between evaluative, interpretive, and attentional processes, signaling multiple parallel directions of influence. Evaluative processes may regulate interpretive processes, or the extent to which others’ mental states are taken into account,180,181 as suggested, for example, by research showing that gazeinduced object desirability becomes diminished for identities that are recognized as untrustworthy or anti-social.182,183 Additionally, “being looked back at,” which is often found to decrease attentional engagement, also appears to interact with the interest in engaging in a social interaction with a specific agent. In relation to this topic, while Laidlaw and colleagues demonstrated that the belief of “being looked back at” reduced attentional engagement in the absence of social interest (e.g., in a situation like a dentist’s waiting room),39 Wu and colleagues showed that social interest toward a specific individual increased reciprocal attentional engagement between two interactive partners (e.g., in a situation like a lunch at a University cafeteria).184 However, interpretive processes also act on evaluative processes. For example, Gobel and colleagues have shown that others’ social rank boosts social orienting only when participants perceived the other agent as a human social partner with whom they were interacting on the same task as opposed to a 12

computer-delivered cue or a human agent engaged on a different task.185 Additionally, the same authors reported that the belief of being looked back at has an ability to reverse the preferential responding to high-status individuals. That is, observers tend to look proportionally less at the eyes of highstatus individuals when there exists potential to be looked back at, relative to when this potential is absent.186 When this evidence is considered together, it appears that perceptual, interpretive, and evaluative processes operate interdependently in a dynamically interactive fashion rather than in a strictly sequential manner. Future work is needed to map the directions of processing influence across stimuli and contexts as well as to understand the relative independence of the analyses occurring within each core stream. Neuroimaging and neuropsychological work will be particularly useful in this aim. Capitalizing on the present knowledge implicating several different brain networks contributing to attentional, perceptual, interpretive, and evaluative functions, neuroimaging and clinical studies will be highly beneficial for examining both their putative independence as well as their connections. At the neural level, mentalizing processes have been associated with the activity occurring within cortical regions such as the medio-prefrontal cortex, TPJ, and precuneus.187 Socio-evaluative processes, on the other hand, have been associated with the activity in both cortical and subcortical regions, including the orbitofrontal cortex, ventro-medial prefrontal cortex, striatum, and amygdala.45,143,188,189 Future studies could manipulate perceptual, interpretive, and evaluative operations in isolation and in combination to uncover the pathways through which these processes connect and interact with attentional systems. For example, while existing research shows clear links between attention and social perception, little remains known about how attention interfaces with interpretive and evaluative processes on a neural level. One possibility is that the STS and the adjacent TPJ, which have been proposed to represent the hubs for social perception and social cognition,61,78,79,82,190 serve to connect the processing within each of the three routes with the attentional systems. Another possibility is that each route of processing may have a more direct access to attentional systems. Investigations with

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clinical populations offer a unique way to examine the effects of selective impairment in neural function and behavior following neuropsychological damage to attentional systems or to one or more routes of processing. For example, substantial evidence now demonstrates that individuals with autism show impairments in interpretive functions, but there is no clear evidence for dysfunctions in evaluative operations.191 Thus, systematic investigations of the neural systems associated with each of the three routes of processing as well as their links with attentional systems will contribute to a more thorough understanding of the specific role that each of the three core processes plays in both typical and atypical social function. Attention as a gate for social interactions The evidence that we have reviewed here shows that attentional systems interact with perceptual, interpretative, and evaluative processes to enable the heterogeneity of human social attentional behaviors. Specifically, attentional behaviors respond to the interplay between these three routes of processing to modulate the prioritization of social information in the environment as well as the required flexibility of social responses. Hence, just as one of the main functions of the attention system is to select from a large number of sensory stimuli,192 one of the primary functions of social attention appears to be to select among pieces of available social information. In turn, this ability appears essential for the selection and management of our social interactions. This role of attention in social communication and behavior is readily illustrated by our everyday experiences, such as walking on a busy city street depicted in Figure 3. In this situation, attention acts to highlight social affordances by being preferentially engaged by social cues (e.g., people) relative to nonsocial items (e.g., trees, lights, and buildings; Fig. 3A). However, further processing of social affordances depends on the interpretation of their social meaning, such as agents’ mental states (Fig. 3B) and/or the evaluation of their social identities (Fig. 3C). While interpretive processes allow attentional selection based on the understanding of mental states, goals, and communicative intent (Fig. 3B), evaluative processes allow attentional selection based on factors related to the social identity, such as person familiarity or authority (Fig. 3C). This dynamic interplay between attentional, percep-

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tual, interpretive, and evaluative processes appears to be essential for an effective filtering of the large amount of available social information, allowing in turn the selection and management of our social interactions. In this way, social attention emerges as an essential ability for selection, management, and maintenance of our social interactions. A handful of studies that have investigated how attention operates in similar multiagent settings, such as crowds and small groups, support these notions. Although preliminary, their results show that in multiagent scenarios, which require the simultaneous processing of multiple sources of social information, an effective attentional processing of social cues is affected by group size, social interest, and social status.119,120,129,193 These studies also show differential social attention function in crowds (e.g., an audience at a football match) relative to small groups (e.g., a family gathering). Crowded multiagent situations are characterized by a potentially overwhelming amount of social information.194 Here, the three routes of processing appear to allow for effective monitoring and filtering of social cues in order to prevent indiscriminate responses194 and to maintain a flexibility to focus on relevant social information if needed.119,120,195 In contrast, small groups, typically defined as those composed of 3–5 individuals engaged in a common activity, elicit and afford social interactions that require efficient handling of individual members’ social cues.196 Here, the three routes of processing appear to allow for the dynamic allocation of social attention to each group member depending on their identity, status, and/or situational context.129,131,132 In this paper, we identified the likely mechanisms that may facilitate the behavioral and processing flexibilities that are required by multiagent contexts, with further research needed to build a more consolidated understanding of how attentional operations facilitate social interactions in large and small groups. Future directions and conclusions The novel functional perspective on social attention that we presented here is consistent with recent views that highlight the dynamic nature of human attention. For example, Wolfe and Horowitz argued that the reason why search for specific targets is not overwhelmed by the available objects in the environment is because attention is guided to a subset of

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Figure 3. An illustrated example of how attention may support the selection of social information in the environment. In this typical everyday scenario, depicting a busy street, attention is preferentially engaged by social affordances and cues (e.g., people) versus other objects (e.g., trees, lights, and buildings; A). Further processing, however, depends both on the interpretive processes guiding the inference of agents’ mental states, goals, and communicative intent (B), as well as on evaluative processes which furnish the computation of the value of social information based on the social identity that delivers it (e.g., person of authority; C).

relevant objects by both environment-driven (e.g., greater perceptual saliency of some objects relative to others) and user-driven information (e.g., factors related to the observer’s goal or their perception of the value of individual objects).192 This is consistent with the hypothesis presented here that attentional responses to environmental social affordances are modulated by both social perception and the perceived relevance of available social information. A similar dynamic framework has been advanced by Ristic and Enns, who, based on a review of developmental data, argued that the classic concept of attention as a static gating mechanism does not capture the new findings showing attention as dynamic ability that both influences and is influenced by the interactions between cues, contexts, persons, and their behaviors.197 The present conceptualization extends these general principles to the realm of social attention by identifying the processes that enable such interplay within this specific functional domain and in turn facilitate dynamic social interactive behaviors such as reciprocal34 and shared198 attention. The present perspective also offers theoretical unity to the field, as it allows for effective bridging across domain general and mentalizing views42 as well as across laboratory and naturalistic methodological approaches.5 The present integrated perspective sees domain-general and metalizing operations as complementary rather than in contradiction. This is because domain-general attentional mechanisms appear to form the very basis for responding to social cues, while mentalizing processes interact with those mechanisms to further modulate social attention responses. Similarly, our framework also offers the potential to bridge between laboratory and naturalistic methodological

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approaches, as it prominently features the contributions of interpretive and evaluative processes, a lack of which may have contributed to the past inconsistent findings reported across these two methodological settings. Our integrated account also facilitates future directions for the field that concern an increasingly emerging interest for extending the investigation of socio-cognitive processes from single participant to multiagent and interactive settings.199 The present perspective allows for the study of the general principles that may guide attentional behaviors in interactive situations and provides falsifiable ways of testing the contribution of each of the proposed routes of processing across multiple levels of social complexity, from perception of basic cues to complex social interactive dynamics,200 including processes like joint cognition, joint perception, and social coordination.124,125,198 For example, and increasing theoretical and methodological integration across neural, social, and evolutionary processes,23 future studies could investigate the role of attentional processes in joint action and social coordination.46 One possible line of research concerns the recent theoretical proposal of the dual function of gaze, which is especially prominent while people are immersed in reciprocal social interactions with others.5 Our account provides a methodological approach and a theoretical framework within which to start understanding the interplay between perceptual, social, and individual factors that mediate such dynamic social behaviors, with the results of these future investigations likely yielding fundamental new knowledge about the complex patterns of reciprocal influences occurring between social partners within and across the levels of socio-cognitive analyses.5

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Further extending the field from simplified settings to complex interactive behaviors, the present perspective also facilitates scaling up the study of social attention from relatively passive observations of single participants and dyadic interactions to real-world interactive and dynamic study of multiagent groups and crowds. The present account facilitates the investigation of the processes that mediate the management of multiple sources of social information, with future experimental questions relating the contributions of perceptual, interpretive, and evaluative processes with the contextually modulated transitions between inhibitory responses and dynamic reallocation of attention to social cues. In conclusion, an examination of the classic and emerging evidence in the field of social attention guided us to identify, characterize, and analyze the three core processes that guide our social attention behaviors—perception, interpretation, and evaluation. We argued that the functional relevance of the interplay between these processes is to support the effective selection and management of available social information. As such, this view reveals social attention as a complex and heterogeneous ability with a primary purpose to select and manage one of the core aspects of human life—our social interactions. Acknowledgments This study was supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Qu´ebec—Soci´et´e et culture (FRQSC; F.C.), the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC; F.C. and J.R.), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; J.R.), Women in Cognitive Science (WICS; J.R.), and the William Dawson Chairs Fund (J.R.). Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests. References 1. Loveland, K.A. 1991. Social affordances and interaction II: autism and the affordances of the human environment. Ecol. Psychol. 3: 99–119. 2. Grossmann, T. 2017. The eyes as windows into other minds. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 12: 107–121. 3. Wirth, J.H., D.F. Sacco, K. Hugenberg, et al. 2010. Eye gaze as relational evaluation: averted eye gaze leads to feelings of ostracism and relational devaluation. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 36: 869–882.

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