How attention gates social interactions

Abstract

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.

Attention promotes accurate impression formation

“…Critically, however, the importance of detection processes in impression formation has never been examined using a direct measure of attention. Although some degree of attention to a target is undoubtedly necessary to form an accurate impression, this tendency may be so basic that there may be hardly any practical benefit for attending more to a given target as people very naturally attend to others (Capozzi & Ristic, ; New, Cosmides, & Tooby, ). Thus, our main question is whether looking more at a target, or increased attentional engagement , benefits accurate impression formation.…”

“…Instead, perceived engagement could indicate perceiver motivation to be accurate or a higher quality of information provided by targets, which may foster accuracy through the stages of cue utilization or relevance, rather than detection. Furthermore, while the role of attentional engagement in selecting relevant sources of (social) information in the environment has been extensively investigated (Capozzi & Ristic, ; Wolfe & Horowitz, ), to our knowledge, the extent to which attention contributes to the accuracy of social perception remains unexplored.…”

“…If attentional engagement promotes accurate impression formation, a second, related question is whether specific regions of the targets provide particularly useful sources of information. For example, previous research has suggested that faces and eyes convey important social information as their attentional processing is prioritized over other body parts (for a review see Capozzi & Ristic, ). However, impression formation may also be supported by body language, which has also been found to be highly revealing (de Gelder, ).…”

Face detection in 2‐ to 6‐month‐old infants is influenced by gaze direction and species

“…It is of critical importance to better understand the interaction of infants' developing social skills—attention to faces and attention to the eyes—which lay the groundwork for more complex social skill development (Capozzi & Ristic, ; Gillespie‐Smith et al, ). Indeed, attention to faces in early infancy predicts later emerging social skills.…”

“…• An early developing face specialization system appears to be tuned to the attentional state of socially relevant (own-species) faces. eyes-which lay the groundwork for more complex social skill development (Capozzi & Ristic, 2018;Gillespie-Smith et al, 2016). Indeed, attention to faces in early infancy predicts later emerging social skills.…”