A naturalistic paradigm simulating gaze-based social interactions for the investigation of social agency

Abstract

Sense of agency describes the experience of being the cause of one's own actions and the resulting effects. In a social interaction, one's actions may also have a perceivable effect on the actions of others. In this article, we refer to the experience of being responsible for the behavior of others as social agency, which has important implications for the success or failure of social interactions. Gaze-contingent eyetracking paradigms provide a useful tool to analyze social agency in an experimentally controlled manner, but the current methods are lacking in terms of their ecological validity. We applied this technique in a novel task using video stimuli of real gaze behavior to simulate a gaze-based social interaction. This enabled us to create the impression of a live interaction with another person while being able to manipulate the gaze contingency and congruency shown by the simulated interaction partner in a continuous manner. Behavioral data demonstrated that participants believed they were interacting with a real person and that systematic changes in the responsiveness of the simulated partner modulated the experience of social agency. More specifically, gaze contingency (temporal relatedness) and gaze congruency (gaze direction relative to the participant's gaze) influenced the explicit sense of being responsible for the behavior of the other. In general, our study introduces a new naturalistic task to simulate gaze-based social interactions and demonstrates that it is suitable to studying the explicit experience of social agency.

Agency and reward across development and in autism: A free-choice paradigm

“…Nevertheless, the extant literature and the present study mainly employed simple and un-naturalistic tasks that might have limited potential in capturing the essence of agency and reward, and their role in driving people’s actions and choices, which should be further explored in ecological situations where the action-consequence link takes on real relevance for the person. Agency is also crucial during interpersonal exchanges, whereby each partner of the interaction influences the behaviour of the other through his or her own verbal and non-verbal initiatives, and thus feels that he or she has an active role in the exchange [ 77 ]. Whereas agency research has focused on the use of non-social effects of action, it would be extremely important for future studies to examine the developmental trajectories of agency in social and non-social situations.…”

Motivation from Agency and Reward in Typical Development and Autism: Narrative Review of Behavioral and Neural Evidence

“…In addition, the action–outcome properties that give rise to agency have been mainly studied using non-social outcomes. Agency is crucial during interpersonal exchanges, whereby each partner of the interaction influences the behavior of the other through his or her own verbal and non-verbal initiatives, and the feeling that they have an active role in the exchange [ 133 ]. It is well-known that social characteristics of stimuli involve different neural mechanisms from those devoted to processing non-social stimuli [ 134 ].…”

Clinical Neuroscience Meets Second-Person Neuropsychiatry

“…Following the call for a truly social or second-person neuroscience, recent years have seen a growing number of studies that have focused on core social-interactive behaviors, such as studies in which participants perceive communicative cues to engage them in interaction (e.g., direct gaze) all the way to studies that include reciprocal, face-to-face interactions with a social partner (real or perceived; see Redcay and Schilbach (2019) for a recent review). In addition to increasing the ecological validity of the task used and making the social encounters more lifelike and dynamic, for example, using real video recordings in place of computergenerated avatars (Brandi et al, 2019), second-person neuroscience has also focused on scanning interacting brains, which has been described as hyperscanning (e.g., Bilek et al 2015;Dumas et al 2010). Findings from these studies have helped to gain striking new insights into the workings of "social brains," which, indeed, indicate that the neural mechanisms supporting social interaction do, in fact, differ from those during social observation.…”