Prior attentional bias is modulated by social gaze

Intimate relationships regulate female brain activity in a competitive context: evidence from EEG and functional connectivity analysis

Competition is common in life, and intimate relationships are essential. Understanding how intimate relationships impact an individual's competitive process is crucial. This study explored the impact of competitor gender on female competition using electroencephalography analysis. The results revealed that females exhibited a smaller median of the absolute value of reaction time difference (DRT) between their partners and their competitors when their partners were absent compared to when their partners were present. Additionally, females showed greater average amplitudes of N2 posterior contralateral component (N2pc) and Late Positive Potential (LPP), increased activation of the alpha frequency band, and enhanced theta frequency band functional connectivity between the central parietal lobe and occipital lobe. Furthermore, when competing with individuals of the same gender as opposed to individuals of the opposite gender, females exhibited greater average amplitudes of percentage of wins and N2pc. A significant negative correlation was noted between the DRT and the average wave amplitudes of N2pc and LPP. These findings suggest that females are more engaged in competitive tasks when partners are not present and have improved decision-making when competing with same-gender individuals. This study provides evidence for the influence of lovers on female competition, helping females adapt to social competition and promoting healthy relationships.

Flexible Cultural Learning Through Action Coordination

The cultural transmission of technical know-how has proven vital to the success of our species. The broad diversity of learning contexts and social configurations, as well as the various kinds of coordinated interactions they involve, speaks to our capacity to flexibly adapt to and succeed in transmitting vital knowledge in various learning contexts. Although often recognized by ethnographers, the flexibility of cultural learning has so far received little attention in terms of cognitive mechanisms. We argue that a key feature of the flexibility of cultural learning is that both the models and learners recruit cognitive mechanisms of action coordination to modulate their behavior contingently on the behavior of their partner, generating a process of mutual adaptation supporting the successful transmission of technical skills in diverse and fluctuating learning environments. We propose that the study of cultural learning would benefit from the experimental methods, results, and insights of joint-action research and, complementarily, that the field of joint-action research could expand its scope by integrating a learning and cultural dimension. Bringing these two fields of research together promises to enrich our understanding of cultural learning, its contextual flexibility, and joint action coordination.

Standing out from the crowd: Both cue numerosity and social information affect attention in multi-agent contexts

Groups of people offer abundant opportunities for social interactions. We used a two-phase task to investigate how social cue numerosity and social information about an individual affected attentional allocation in such multi-agent settings. The learning phase was a standard gaze-cuing procedure in which a stimulus face could be either uninformative or informative about the upcoming target. The test phase was a group-cuing procedure in which the stimulus faces from the learning phase were presented in groups of three. The target could either be cued by the group minority (i.e., one face) or majority (i.e., two faces) or by uninformative or informative stimulus faces. Results showed an effect of cue numerosity, whereby responses were faster to targets cued by the group majority than the group minority. However, responses to targets cued by informative identities included in the group minority were as fast as responses to targets cued by the group majority. Thus, previously learned social information about an individual was able to offset the general enhancement of cue numerosity, revealing a complex interplay between cue numerosity and social information in guiding attention in multi-agent settings.