Potential social interactions are important to social attention
Edited by Dale Purves, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, and approved February 23, 2011 (received for review November 14, 2010)
Abstract
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.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions, Nicola Anderson and Michael Smith for helping with coding, and James Farley for help conducting the study. Funding for this project was provided by a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant (to A.K.), a Commonwealth/Government of Canada Fellowship (to T.F.), and an NSERC postgraduate scholarship (to K.E.W.L.).
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Published online: March 21, 2011
Published in issue: April 5, 2011
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions, Nicola Anderson and Michael Smith for helping with coding, and James Farley for help conducting the study. Funding for this project was provided by a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant (to A.K.), a Commonwealth/Government of Canada Fellowship (to T.F.), and an NSERC postgraduate scholarship (to K.E.W.L.).
Notes
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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