Social status gates social attention in monkeys

Shepherd, Stephen V.; Deaner, Robert O.; Platt, Michael L.

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2006.02.013

Cited by 178 publications

(203 citation statements)

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“…For example, observers who are themselves considered low social status should be more inclined to look at high-status individuals, so as to monitor and learn from their superiors (in the same sense that monkeys only follow the gaze of conspecifics who are of higher social status; Shepherd et al, 2006). In fact, previous research suggests that observers low in feelings of belongingness show heightened gaze-following tendencies (Wilkowski, Robinson, & Friesen, 2009).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Chance (1967) hypothesized that social attention would reflect the dominance hierarchy of primate groups, such that the dominant individual receives the greatest number of glances, and a recent study of patas monkeys supported this prediction (McNelis & Boatright-Horowitz, 1998). It has also been demonstrated that the effectiveness of gaze as a social cue depends on the relative social status of the individual: low status monkeys reflexively follow the gaze of any familiar monkey, but high-status macaques will only respond in this way to other high-status animals (Shepherd, Deaner, & Platt, 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

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Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: Effects of social status and speaking

et al. 2010

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a b s t r a c tHuman visual attention operates in a context that is complex, social and dynamic. To explore this, we recorded people taking part in a group decision-making task and then showed video clips of these situations to new participants while tracking their eye movements. Observers spent the majority of time looking at the people in the videos, and in particular at their eyes and faces. The social status of the people in the clips had been rated by their peers in the group task, and this status hierarchy strongly predicted where eyetracker participants looked: high-status individuals were gazed at much more often, and for longer, than low-status individuals, even over short, 20-s videos. Fixation was temporally coupled to the person who was talking at any one time, but this did not account for the effect of social status on attention. These results are consistent with a gaze system that is attuned to the presence of other individuals, to their social status within a group, and to the information most useful for social interaction.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: Effects of social status and speaking

et al. 2010

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“…Although there is some evidence that specific neural circuits mediate these processes (31)(32)(33), the precise contributions of neurons within different brain areas to exogenous, endogenous, and social attention (and, indeed, whether these processes are distinguishable at the neuronal level) remain unclear Second, the fastest reported gaze-following behavior in monkeys is evoked at very short latencies (100 ms after gaze cue onset; see ref. 34), requiring the processing stream that discriminates gaze direction and relays this information to visual orienting areas to operate quite rapidly. Thus, although neuroimaging techniques can identify cortical areas sensitive to the direction of observed gaze, their temporal resolution is too coarse to determine whether these areas are capable of mediating fast gaze-following behavior.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…In principle, these questions could be addressed by recording the activity of neurons in this putative social attention processing stream during spontaneous gaze following in controlled laboratory conditions (5,34). To begin addressing these questions, we probed the impact of social gaze cues on the firing rates of LIP neurons in monkeys performing a simple visual orienting task, in which monkeys were required to maintain fixation on a monkey face with averted gaze, and then to shift their own gaze toward a peripheral target randomly illuminated either within or outside the direction of observed gaze.…”

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“…We were particularly interested in whether the response dynamics were quick enough to mediate the rapid behavioral responses observed in a standard gaze-following probe ( Fig. 1) (2,5,34). To our knowledge, no prior studies have linked the responses of single neurons to gazefollowing behavior or reported the latency at which observed gaze direction is signaled by neurons in the brain.…”

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Mirroring of attention by neurons in macaque parietal cortex

Shepherd

Klein²,

Deaner³

et al. 2009

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

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Macaques, like humans, rapidly orient their attention in the direction other individuals are looking. Both cortical and subcortical pathways have been proposed as neural mediators of social gaze following, but neither pathway has been characterized electrophysiologically in behaving animals. To address this gap, we recorded the activity of single neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) of rhesus macaques to determine whether and how this area might contribute to gaze following. A subset of LIP neurons mirrored observed attention by firing both when the subject looked in the preferred direction of the neuron, and when observed monkeys looked in the preferred direction of the neuron, despite the irrelevance of the monkey images to the task. Importantly, the timing of these modulations matched the time course of gaze-following behavior. A second population of neurons was suppressed by social gaze cues, possibly subserving task demands by maintaining fixation on the observed face. These observations suggest that LIP contributes to sharing of observed attention and link mirror representations in parietal cortex to a well studied imitative behavior.gaze following ͉ imitation ͉ joint attention ͉ mirror neurons ͉ shared attention P eople naturally and intuitively share attention with each other. In a laboratory setting, people respond more quickly to targets that are the object of another's attention, even when this social cuing is brief or consistently misleading (1-3). Monkeys' attention also follows the gaze of others (4), and the similar magnitude and time course of gaze following by rhesus macaques and humans (5) implicates shared neural mechanisms. The ability to follow gaze is believed to be an important foundation for theory of mind (6, 7); thus, the neural processes governing gaze following are relevant both to the evolution of social cognition (8-10) and to clinical disorders, such as autism, associated with social attention deficits (11)(12)(13)(14). Although gaze following involves automatic ''mirroring'' of other's mental states, to our knowledge, mirror neurons (15, 16) for visual orienting have not previously been identified.Current evidence suggests that identification of where other individuals are looking is accomplished by neurons along the superior temporal sulcus (STS) (17)(18)(19)(20) (22), as well as the parietal cortex (28). These observations invite the simple hypothesis that gazefollowing behavior is mediated by a relatively straightforward system, beginning with the STS and proceeding directly to the attention-and gaze-control networks. Although intuitively appealing, this model raises several important questions.First, gaze-following behavior fits poorly into existing models of attention (1, 2), which dichotomize the underlying mechanism as either reflexively driven by exogenous stimuli or endogenously guided by internal goals (29, 30). Although there is some evidence that specific neural circuits mediate these processes (31-33), the precise contributions of neurons within different b...

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