| 其他摘要 | Human beings are adept at capturing the focus of attention from others and obtain critical information in a fast-changing environment through social attention. This ability plays a crucial role in the everyday effective social interactions and underlies the development of adaptive functioning in humans. However, whether this indispensable ability is unique and qualitatively distinct from non-social attention remains equivocal. In the following four studies, we investigated the specific cognitive and neural mechanisms of social attention.
In Study 1, using the visual adaptation technique in conjunction with a modified central cueing paradigm, we investigated the specificity of social attention induced by social cues. Results revealed that adaptation to the walking direction of biological motion (BM) affected the reflexive attentional effect triggered by subsequent BM cues. Critically, adapting to another distinctively different social cue (i.e., eye gaze) could also modulate BM-mediated attentional orienting and vice versa, reflecting remarkable cross-category adaptation aftereffects between different social cues. Moreover, the lack of cross-category adaptation aftereffect between social (i.e., BM) and non-social cues (i.e., arrows) highlighted a double dissociation between social and non-social attention. Collectively, these findings demonstrated that social attention induced by different types of cues might share common neural substrates and dissociate from non-social attention.
In Study 2, we introduced working memory (WM) as a high-level cognitive process, and explored whether maintaining social cues in WM could automatically guide our focus of attention. Using the delayed-match-to-sample paradigm combined with the dot-probe task, we found that incidentally holding eye gaze cues in WM could automatically induce attentional orienting effect. However, such WM-induced social attention effect could not be generalized to non-social cues (i.e., arrows), regardless of whether arrows were incidentally or intentionally memorized. Taken together, Study 2 provided clear evidence that social cues stored in WM could automatically guide spatial attention, and highlighted the uniqueness of cognitive mechanisms underlying social attention as compared to non-social attention.
In Study 3, we tapped into the perception of social cues in the absence of conscious awareness, and investigated the modulation of WM contents on the perception of eye gaze that was rendered invisible. Using the breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) technique embedded in the delayed-match-to-sample paradigm, our results revealed that suppressed faces with averted eye gaze got prior access to awareness when the gaze direction matched that of the face held in WM. Importantly, such modulation effect was also found when another social cue (i.e., head orientation) was memorized as WM content, but not non-social cues (i.e., arrows). These findings provided direct evidence that WM contents in social domain could act as a top-down mechanism to enhance nonconscious processing of relevant social cues, and again clearly distinguished social attention from non-social attention.
In Study 4, we followed the same paradigm as in the Study 1, and examined the adaptation aftereffects of social attention at the neural level by using event-related potential (ERP) technique. Results revealed similar aftereffects of early directing attention negativity (EDAN) induced by the BM cues after adapting to the walking direction of BM as well as eye gaze direction. However, we failed to find this aftereffect when arrows were employed as adaptors. These findings were the most direct neural evidence for the specific neural mechanism of social attention.
Taken together, these findings provided evidence for the view that “social attention is special” from both the perspectives of bottom-up and top-down processes, and supported the existence of “social attention detector” in the human brain. |
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