The Functional Consequences of Social Attention for Memory-guided Attention Orienting and Anticipatory Neural Dynamics

Understanding perceptual decisions by studying development and neurodiversity

A cornerstone of human information processing is how we make decisions about incoming sensory percepts. Much of psychological science has focused on understanding how these judgements operate in skilled adult observers. While not typically the focus of this research, there is considerable variability in how adults make these judgements. Here, we review complementary computational modelling, electrophysiological data, eye-tracking and longitudinal approaches to the study of perceptual decisions across neurotypical development and in neurodivergent individuals. These data highlight multiple parameters and temporal dynamics feeding into how we become skilled adult perceptual decision makers, and which may help explain why we vary so much in how we make perceptual decisions.

Social attention, memory, and memory-guided orienting change across the menstrual cycle

Numerous studies have shown that perception of emotion and emotional memory vary across the menstrual cycle. However, most of these studies used stimuli that contained not only emotional but also social elements. Importantly, the social cognitive abilities of individuals are as crucial as emotional abilities for danger avoidance and recruitment of allies. Therefore, the issue that natural hormonal fluctuations may affect emotion processing should be revisited. To investigate whether the effects of the menstrual cycle are emotion-specific or can also be attributed to social information processing, the present study examined social attention across the menstrual cycle in three tasks-visual search, memory, and memory-guided orienting-with a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking measures. We used images of people standing upright with neutral emotion as social distractors and everyday objects with physical properties matched as non-social distractors. Thirty-six healthy women without hormone use and with stable menstrual cycles of 26 - 30 days participated in the three tasks in the late follicular phase (FP) and mid-luteal phase (LP), respectively. During visual search, participants were asked to search for targets accompanied by social or non-social distractors in complex scenes. Social attentional bias, as evidenced by longer search times and shorter gaze behaviors for targets with social distractors, was found in the FP but not in the LP. In the following memory task, memory accuracy for targets was higher in the FP than in the LP, and the memory for targets with social distractors was more precise in both phases. Finally, in the orienting task, targets in social scenes were detected more slowly than in non-social scenes in LP. Taken together, these findings point to the interplay between social attention, memory, and memory-oriented attention and reveal the distinct processing pathways for social information in the FP and LP. The underlying mechanisms from an evolutionary perspective and from behavioral and neural basis were discussed.

Social context influences infants' ability to extract statistical information from a sequence of gestures

Infants' social environment is rich of complex sequences of events and actions. This study investigates whether 12-month-old infants are able to learn statistical regularities from a sequence of human gestures and whether this ability is affected by a social vs non-social context. Using a visual familiarization task, infants were familiarized to a continuous sequence of eight videos in which two women imitated each other performing arm gestures. The sequence of videos in which the two women performed imitative gestures was organized into 4 different gesture units. Videos within a gesture unit had a highly predictable transitional probability, while such transition was less predictable between gesture units. The social context was manipulated varying the mutual gaze of the actors and their body orientation. At test, infants were able to discriminate between the high- and low-predictable gesture units in the social, but not in the non-social condition. Results demonstrate that infants are capable to detect statistical regularities from a sequence of human gestures performed by two different individuals. Moreover, our findings indicate that salient social cues can modulate infants' ability to extract statistical information from a sequence of gestures.