Cognitive Ethology and exploring attention in real-world scenes

Smilek, Daniel; Birmingham, Elina; Cameron, David; Bischof, Walter F.; Kingstone, Alan

doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2005.12.090

Cited by 125 publications

(112 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“….6]. Dovetailing with our analyses of unique breakpoint windows and conceptually replicating past studies that have investigated attentional effects elicited by static social information (e.g., Friesen & Kingstone, 1998;Smilek et al, 2006), these data indicate that dynamic social information also appears to be attended automatically. Moreover, our results also suggest that attention paid to social information consequently aids the formation of social perception units, as eye movements directed to social cues during passive viewing reliably predicted eye movements towards the same social cues during the social segmentation task.…”

Section: Overlapping Social and Nonsocial Breakpointsupporting

confidence: 85%

“…Based on the large literature indicating attentional priority for eyes and faces (e.g., Frischen, Bayliss, & Tipper, 2007;Smilek et al, 2006), one might predict that parsing social events on a more fine-grained scale, as it would be required during a breakpoint window that is marked as both social and nonsocial, would depend on the information conveyed by subtle social cues. If so, during this overlapping breakpoint window, participants should be fixating eyes and faces more while performing a social than a nonsocial segmentation task.…”

Section: Overlapping Social and Nonsocial Breakpointmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Social event segmentation

Boggia

Ristic

2015

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Humans are experts in understanding social environments. What perceptual and cognitive processes enable such competent evaluation of social information? Here we show that environmental content is grouped into units of "social perception", which are formed automatically based on the attentional priority given to social information conveyed by eyes and faces. When asked to segment a clip showing a typical daily scenario, participants were remarkably consistent in identifying the boundaries of social events. Moreover, at those social event boundaries, participants' eye movements were reliably directed to actors' eyes and faces. Participants' indices of attention measured during the initial passive viewing, reflecting natural social behaviour, also showed a remarkable correspondence with overt social segmentation behaviour, reflecting the underlying perceptual organization. Together, these data show that dynamic information is automatically organized into meaningful social events on an ongoing basis, strongly suggesting that the natural comprehension of social content in daily life might fundamentally depend on this underlying grouping process.

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Section: Overlapping Social and Nonsocial Breakpointsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Overlapping Social and Nonsocial Breakpointmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social event segmentation

Boggia

Ristic

2015

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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“…These results are consistent with studies using isolated face stimuli, finding that individuals with autism spend significantly less time fixated on the eyes (Dalton et al, 2005;Pelphrey et al, 2002). However, stimulus characteristics play a central role in fixation patterns, with differences between fixations towards drawings, photographs, isolated faces and movie clips (van der Geest, Kemner, Camfferman, Verbaten, & van Engeland., 2002a;Speer, Cook, McMahon, & Clark, 2007) such that reducing ecological validity impacts upon results (see Smilek, Birmingham, Cameron, Bischof, & Kingstone, 2006 in relation to 'cognitive ethology' when discussing the issue of ecological validity in eye-tracking research). In the current paper the term ecological validity refers to how well the stimuli mirror realistic social information.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Viewing it differently: Social scene perception in Williams syndrome and Autism

2008

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The genetic disorder Williams syndrome (WS) is associated with a propulsion towards social stimuli and interactions with people. In contrast, the neuro-developmental disorder autism is characterised by social withdrawal and lack of interest in socially relevant information. Using eye-tracking techniques we investigate how individuals with these two neuro-developmental disorders associated with distinct social characteristics view scenes containing people. The way individuals with these disorders view social stimuli may impact upon successful social interactions and communication. Whilst individuals with autism spend less time than is typical viewing people and faces in static pictures of social interactions, the opposite is apparent for those with WS whereby exaggerated fixations are prevalent towards the eyes. The results suggest more attention should be drawn towards understanding the implications of atypical social preferences in WS, in the same way that attention has been drawn to the social deficits associated with autism.

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“…eye movements | overt visual attention | visual cognition | autism I nterest in understanding how our visual attention is influenced by social stimuli has grown substantially in recent years (1)(2)(3)(4)(5). Everyday experience tells us that the social content of a scene, such as the people or faces in it, can "grab" our attention, leading us to focus in on these social stimuli, often at the expense of attending to other features in our environment.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Potential social interactions are important to social attention

Laidlaw

Foulsham

Kuhn

et al. 2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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270

333

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Social attention, or how spatial attention is allocated to biologically relevant stimuli, has typically been studied using simplistic paradigms that do not provide any opportunity for social interaction. To study social attention in a complex setting that affords social interaction, we measured participants' looking behavior as they were sitting in a waiting room, either in the presence of a confederate posing as another research participant, or in the presence of a videotape of the same confederate. Thus, the potential for social interaction existed only when the confederate was physically present. Although participants frequently looked at the videotaped confederate, they seldom turned toward or looked at the live confederate. Ratings of participants' social skills correlated with head turns to the live, but not videotaped, confederate. Our results demonstrate the importance of studying social attention within a social context, and suggest that the mere opportunity for social interaction can alter social attention.eye movements | overt visual attention | visual cognition | autism

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Cognitive Ethology and exploring attention in real-world scenes

Cited by 125 publications

References 44 publications

Social event segmentation

Social event segmentation

Viewing it differently: Social scene perception in Williams syndrome and Autism

Potential social interactions are important to social attention

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