Brief report: Attentional Bias towards Social Interactions during Viewing of Naturalistic Scenes

Abstract

Human visual attention is readily captured by the social information in scenes. Multiple studies have shown that social areas of interest (AOIs) such as faces and bodies attract more attention than non-social AOIs (e.g. objects or background). However, whether this attentional bias is moderated by the presence (or absence) of a social interaction remains unclear. Here, the gaze of 70 young adults was tracked during the free viewing of 60 naturalistic scenes. All photographs depicted two people, who were either interacting or not. Analyses of dwell time revealed that more attention was spent on human than background AOIs in the interactive pictures. In non-interactive pictures, however, dwell time did not differ between AOI type. In the time-to-first-fixation analysis, humans always captured attention before other elements of the scene, although this difference was slightly larger in the interactive than non-interactive scenes. These findings confirm the existence of a bias towards social information in attentional capture, and suggest that the presence of social interaction may be important in inducing a similar social bias in attentional engagemente. Together with previous research using less naturalistic stimuli, these findings suggest that social interactions carry additional social value that guides one's perceptual system.

The role of motion in the neural representation of social interactions in the posterior temporal cortex

“…While the mean differences between interactions and non-interactions for both visual interest and valence were small, they were reliable. Thus, it is possible that some of the difference in brain response to interactions and non-interactions could be at least partially driven by heightened interest and/or increased attention to human information in scenes of social interactions ( Skripkauskaite et al., 2021 ). Similarly, despite the use of a task that did not require mentalising or social processing, our results could reflect top-down influence from the mentalising network, as participants are intuitively more likely to engage in mentalising when viewing social interactions.…”

Functional selectivity for social interaction perception in the human superior temporal sulcus during natural viewing

“…Our results suggest that, even in a real-world setting, social interactions are processed in a manner that is distinct from other perceptual and social features. In both simple visual displays (Su et al, 2016) and natural images (Skripkauskaite et al, 2021), there is an attentional bias for social interactions. Why do social interactions capture our attention and how do we use them to reason about interacting individuals?…”

Are social interactions preferentially attended in real-world scenes? Evidence from change blindness

“…While some researchers have used complex visual scenes to investigate social interaction processing (e.g., Birmingham et al, 2009;Skripkauskaite et al, 2022), many previous studies investigating how we process social interactions have used highly controlled images (e.g., where two identical bodies are posing at equal distance on neutral backgrounds; Bunce et al, 2021;Gray et al, 2017;Papeo et al, 2017Papeo et al, , 2019Vestner et al, 2019). The present study used real-world scenes which were not homogeneous.…”

“…Considering that people are often found interacting with others, and the importance of social interactions in everyday life, it is important to explore whether social interactions are prioritised in more realistic scenes. A limited number of studies have investigated social interaction processing in real-world scenes (e.g., Birmingham et al, 2009;Skripkauskaite et al, 2022). Birmingham et al, 2009 recorded observers' eye-movements while they viewed scenes including of one or three individuals; when three individuals were presented, they were either interacting or non-interacting.…”

“…General scanning behaviour was not found to differ between the interacting versus non-interacting conditions; however, no data were provided on the time-course of the eye-movements, so it is not possible to tell if interactions were prioritised (i.e., fixated earlier) in relation to non-interactions. Skripkauskaite et al (2022) published a study in which observers' eye-movements were tracked while viewing real-world scenes of interacting or non-interacting dyads. They found that observers' overt attention was more quickly drawn to dyads interacting than not interacting.…”