Research in cognitive science typically places a boundary between participants and the stimuli they are asked to process. While this separation affords experimental control, it can also severely limit the generalizability of the conclusions that are drawn. Here, we review new evidence that some conclusions that have been drawn about social attention do not extend beyond the laboratory. They fundamentally misrepresent how social attention operates in natural social contexts. Critically, these difficulties have led to renewed interest in the dual function of gaze—when in authentic social situations, the eyes both collect information from the environment (an encoding function) and communicate one’s mental states to others (a signaling function)—which traditional social-attention paradigms arguably have failed to capture. We review this recent work and discuss the utility of adopting more naturalistic methods in cognitive science.

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Breaking the Fourth Wall of Cognitive Science Real-World Social Attention and the Dual Function of Gaze

Recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) has been successfully used for describing dynamic systems that are too complex to be characterized adequately by standard methods in time series analysis. More recently, RQA has been used for analyzing the coordination of gaze patterns between cooperating individuals. Here, we extend RQA to the characterization of fixation sequences, and we show that the global and local temporal characteristics of fixation sequences can be captured by a small number of RQA measures that have a clear interpretation in this context. We applied RQA to the analysis of a study in which observers looked at different scenes under natural or gaze-contingent viewing conditions, and we found large differences in the RQA measures between the viewing conditions, indicating that RQA is a powerful new tool for the analysis of the temporal patterns of eye movement behavior.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758%2Fs13428-012-0299-5.pdf

Recurrence quantification analysis of eye movements.

Inferring the relative rank (ie, status) of others is essential to navigating social hierarchies A survey of the expanding social psychological and neuroscience literatures on status reveals a diversity of focuses (eg, perceiver vs agent), operationalizations (eg, status as dominance vs wealth), and methodologies (eg, behavioral, neuroscientific) Accommodating this burgeoning literature on status in person perception, the present review offers a novel social neuroscientific framework that integrates existing work with theoretical clarity This framework distinguishes between five key concepts: (1) strategic pathways to status acquisition for agents, (2) status antecedents (ie, perceptual and knowledge-based cues that confer status rank), (3) status dimensions (ie, domains in which an individual may be ranked, such as wealth), (4) status level (ie, one’s rank along a given dimension), and (5) the relative importance of a given status dimension, dependent on perceiver and context character

How Social Status Shapes Person Perception and Evaluation: A Social Neuroscience Perspective:

Humans tend to shift attention according to others' eye-gaze direction. This is a core ability as it permits to create pervasive relationships among individuals and with the environment around them. In the beginning, this form of social orienting was considered a reflexive phenomenon, but in recent years evidence has shown that it is also permeable to several social factors related to the observer, the individual depicted in the cueing face, and the relationship between them. The major goal of this work is to provide a comprehensive overview concerning the role that social variables can play in shaping covert gaze cueing in healthy adults, critically examining both the modulatory social factors for which evidence is more robust and those for which evidence is mixed. When available, overt attention studies will also be discussed. Finally, a novel theoretical framework linking these social and attention domains will be also introduced.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/s13423-020-01730-x.pdf

Social modulators of gaze-mediated orienting of attention: A review.

Over the centuries, magicians have developed extensive knowledge about the manipulation of the human mind—knowledge that has been largely ignored by psychology. It has recently been argued that this knowledge could help improve our understanding of human cognition and consciousness. But to what extent is this possible? What has already been done? And how much could it ultimately contribute to our exploration of the human mind? We propose here a framework outlining how knowledge about magic can be used to help us understand the human mind. Various approaches—both old and new—are surveyed, in terms of four different levels. The first focuses on the methods in magic, using these to suggest new approaches to existing issues in psychology. The second focuses on the effects that magic can produce, such as the sense of wonder induced by seeing an apparently impossible event. Third is the consideration of magic tricks—methods and effects together—as phenomena of scientific interest in their own right. Finally, there is the organization of knowledge about magic into an informative whole, including the possibility of a science centered around the experience of wonder.

/pdf/a-framework-for-using-magic-to-study-the-mind-1usa50s9xh.pdf

A framework for using magic to study the mind

Magicians use misdirection to prevent you from realizing the methods used to create a magical effect, thereby allowing you to experience an apparently impossible event. Magicians have acquired much knowledge about misdirection, and have suggested several taxonomies of misdirection. These describe many of the fundamental principles in misdirection, focusing on how misdirection is achieved by magicians. In this article we review the strengths and weaknesses of past taxonomies, and argue that a more natural way of making sense of misdirection is to focus on the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved. Our psychologically-based taxonomy has three basic categories, corresponding to the types of psychological mechanisms affected: perception, memory, and reasoning. Each of these categories is then divided into subcategories based on the mechanisms that control these effects. This new taxonomy can help organize magicians' knowledge of misdirection in a meaningful way, and facilitate the dialog between magicians and scientists.

/pdf/a-psychologically-based-taxonomy-of-misdirection-30gg71e4mn.pdf

A psychologically-based taxonomy of misdirection

When people view images, their saccades are predominantly horizontal and show a positively skewed distribution of amplitudes How are these patterns affected by the information close to fixation and the features in the periphery? We recorded saccades while observers encoded a set of scenes with a gaze-contingent window at fixation: Features inside a rectangular (Experiment 1) or elliptical (Experiment 2) window were intact; peripheral background was masked completely or blurred When the window was asymmetric, with more information preserved either horizontally or vertically, saccades tended to follow the information within the window, rather than exploring unseen regions, which runs counter to the idea that saccades function to maximize information gain on each fixation Window shape also affected fixation and amplitude distributions, but horizontal windows had less of an impact The findings suggest that saccades follow the features currently being processed and that normal vision samples these features from a horizontally elongated region

/pdf/saccade-control-in-natural-images-is-shaped-by-the-3ia0g23u30.pdf

Saccade control in natural images is shaped by the information visible at fixation: evidence from asymmetric gaze-contingent windows

Don't be fooled! Attentional responses to social cues in a face-to-face and video magic trick reveals greater top-down control for overt than covert attention.

Previous research has revealed marked improvements in cognitive control between the age of 10 years and adulthood. The aim of the current study was to explore differences in attentional control between adults and children within a natural context, namely whilst they were watching a magic trick. We measured participants’ eye movements whilst they watched a misdirection trick in which attentional misdirection was used to prevent observers from noticing a salient visual event. Half of our participants failed to detect this event even though it took place in full view. Children below the age of 10 were significantly less likely to notice the event than the adults and were also more reliably overtly misdirected (i.e., where they looked). Our results illustrate that within a more naturalistic context children are significantly more distracted than adults, and this distraction can have major implications on their visual awareness.

Don't get misdirected! Differences in overt and covert attentional inhibition between children and adults.

In two experiments, participants performed visual detection, visual discrimination and decision-making tasks, in which a binary (left/right) response was required. In all experimental conditions, a spoken word (“left”/“right”) was presented monaurally (left or right ear) at the onset of the visual stimulus. In Experiment 1, 26 non-athletes located a target amongst an array of distractors as quickly as possible, in both the presence and absence of spoken cues. Participants performed superiorly in the presence of valid cues, relative to invalid-cue and control conditions. In Experiment 2, 42 skilled netballers completed three tasks, in randomised order: a visual detection task, a visual discrimination task and a netball decision-making task – all in the presence of spoken cues. Our data showed that spoken auditory cues affected not only target detection, but also performance on more complex decision-making tasks: cues that were either spatially or semantically invalid slowed target detection time; s...

/pdf/attentional-capture-by-spoken-language-effects-on-netballers-4rlo7zoc29.pdf

Robert Teszka

Papers

A psychologically-based taxonomy of misdirection

Saccade control in natural images is shaped by the information visible at fixation: evidence from asymmetric gaze-contingent windows

Don't be fooled! Attentional responses to social cues in a face-to-face and video magic trick reveals greater top-down control for overt than covert attention.

Don't get misdirected! Differences in overt and covert attentional inhibition between children and adults.

Attentional capture by spoken language: effects on netballers’ visual task performance