Declarative referential gesturing in a wild chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes).

Humans are argued to be unique in their ability and motivation to share attention with others about external entities-sharing attention for sharing's sake. Indeed, in humans, using referential gestures declaratively to direct the attention of others toward external objects and events emerges in the first year of life. In contrast, wild great apes seldom use referential gestures, and when they do, it seems to be exclusively for imperative purposes. This apparent species difference has fueled the argument that the motivation and ability to share attention with others is a human-specific trait with important downstream consequences for the evolution of our complex cognition [M. Tomasello, Becoming Human (2019)]. Here, we report evidence of a wild ape showing a conspecific an item of interest. We provide video evidence of an adult female chimpanzee, Fiona, showing a leaf to her mother, Sutherland, in the context of leaf grooming in Kibale Forest, Uganda. We use a dataset of 84 similar leaf-grooming events to explore alternative explanations for the behavior, including food sharing and initiating dyadic grooming or playing. Our observations suggest that in highly specific social conditions, wild chimpanzees, like humans, may use referential showing gestures to direct others' attention to objects simply for the sake of sharing. The difference between humans and our closest living relatives in this regard may be quantitative rather than qualitative, with ramifications for our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition.

Eye contact marks the rise and fall of shared attention in conversation.

Conversation is the platform where minds meet: the venue where information is shared, ideas cocreated, cultural norms shaped, and social bonds forged. Its frequency and ease belie its complexity. Every conversation weaves a unique shared narrative from the contributions of independent minds, requiring partners to flexibly move into and out of alignment as needed for conversation to both cohere and evolve. How two minds achieve this coordination is poorly understood. Here we test whether eye contact, a common feature of conversation, predicts this coordination by measuring dyadic pupillary synchrony (a corollary of shared attention) during natural conversation. We find that eye contact is positively correlated with synchrony as well as ratings of engagement by conversation partners. However, rather than elicit synchrony, eye contact commences as synchrony peaks and predicts its immediate and subsequent decline until eye contact breaks. This relationship suggests that eye contact signals when shared attention is high. Furthermore, we speculate that eye contact may play a corrective role in disrupting shared attention (reducing synchrony) as needed to facilitate independent contributions to conversation.

Human children, but not great apes, become socially closer by sharing an experience in common ground.

To create social closeness, humans engage in a variety of social activities centered around shared experiences. Even simply watching the same video side by side creates social closeness in adults and children. However, perhaps surprisingly, a similar psychological mechanism was recently shown in great apes. Here we asked whether the process by which this social closeness is created is the same for children and great apes. Each participant entered a room to see an experimenter (E1) watching a video. In one condition, E1 looked to the participant at the start of the video to establish common ground that they were watching the video together. In another condition, E1 did not look to the participant in this way so that the participant knew they were watching the same video, but the participant did not know whether E1 was aware of this as well, so there was no common ground (E1 looked to the participant later in the procedure). Children, but not great apes, approached the experimenter faster after the common ground condition, suggesting that although both humans and great apes create social closeness by co-attending to something in close proximity, creating social closeness by sharing experiences in common ground may be a uniquely human social-cognitive process.

In the presence of conflicting gaze cues, fearful expression and eye-size guide attention.

Humans are social beings that often interact in multi-individual environments. As such, we are frequently confronted with nonverbal social signals, including eye-gaze direction, from multiple individuals. Yet, the factors that allow for the prioritisation of certain gaze cues over others are poorly understood. Using a modified conflicting gaze paradigm, we tested the hypothesis that fearful gaze would be favoured amongst competing gaze cues. We further hypothesised that this effect is related to the increased sclera exposure, which is characteristic of fearful expressions. Across three experiments, we found that fearful, but not happy, gaze guides observers' attention over competing non-emotional gaze. The guidance of attention by fearful gaze appears to be linked to increased sclera exposure. However, differences in sclera exposure do not prioritise competing gazes of other types. Thus, fearful gaze guides attention among competing cues and this effect is facilitated by increased sclera exposure - but increased sclera exposure per se does not guide attention. The prioritisation of fearful gaze over non-emotional gaze likely represents an adaptive means of selectively attending to survival-relevant spatial locations.

Neural substrates of shared attention as social memory: A hyperscanning functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

During a dyadic social interaction, two individuals can share visual attention through gaze, directed to each other (mutual gaze) or to a third person or an object (joint attention). Shared attention is fundamental to dyadic face-to-face interaction, but how attention is shared, retained, and neutrally represented in a pair-specific manner has not been well studied. Here, we conducted a two-day hyperscanning functional magnetic resonance imaging study in which pairs of participants performed a real-time mutual gaze task followed by a joint attention task on the first day, and mutual gaze tasks several days later. The joint attention task enhanced eye-blink synchronization, which is believed to be a behavioral index of shared attention. When the same participant pairs underwent mutual gaze without joint attention on the second day, enhanced eye-blink synchronization persisted, and this was positively correlated with inter-individual neural synchronization within the right inferior frontal gyrus. Neural synchronization was also positively correlated with enhanced eye-blink synchronization during the previous joint attention task session. Consistent with the Hebbian association hypothesis, the right inferior frontal gyrus had been activated both by initiating and responding to joint attention. These results indicate that shared attention is represented and retained by pair-specific neural synchronization that cannot be reduced to the individual level.

Social orienting in gaze leading: a mechanism for shared attention.

Here, we report a novel social orienting response that occurs after viewing averted gaze. We show, in three experiments, that when a person looks from one location to an object, attention then shifts towards the face of an individual who has subsequently followed the person's gaze to that same object. That is, contrary to 'gaze following', attention instead orients in the opposite direction to observed gaze and towards the gazing face. The magnitude of attentional orienting towards a face that 'follows' the participant's gaze is also associated with self-reported autism-like traits. We propose that this gaze leading phenomenon implies the existence of a mechanism in the human social cognitive system for detecting when one's gaze has been followed, in order to establish 'shared attention' and maintain the ongoing interaction.

Temporal analysis of attentional processes in spontaneous interactions between people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities and their support workers.

BACKGROUND: Few studies examined joint attention in interactions with people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD), although being an important component of high-quality interaction. The purpose of this study is to describe initiating joint attention behaviour from people with PIMD and their support workers as well as the sequential relationship between initiating joint attention behaviour and attention episodes in spontaneous interactions. METHOD: Video observations of 28 support worker-client dyads were coded using partial interval coding. RESULTS: Results show much variation across persons and dyads. Within the support worker-client dyad, there is not much joint attention but shared attention is frequently occurring. In general, people with PIMD are directing the attention of their interaction partner at low rates. The support workers are frequently directing the attention of the clients towards a topic of interest but not often through the tactile modality. The occurrence of an attention episode cannot be predicted on the basis of preceding initiating joint attention behaviour of the interaction partners. CONCLUSION: This study presents directions for future research and implications for practice. It may increase support workers' knowledge of their own contributions, strengths and weaknesses in directing and maintaining attention within interactions with people with PIMD.

Shared attention in virtual immersive reality enhances electrophysiological correlates of implicit sensory learning.

Shared attention effects on learning and memory demonstrate that experiences are amplified when we are not alone. Virtual reality poses new challenges to the study of co-presence. Above all, is coattending together with someone else's avatar in an immersive VR setting comparable with shared experiences at a neural processing level? In the present study we investigate shared attention effects in VR for the first time. We recorded mismatch negativities (MMN) during an auditory roving paradigm, a well-known index of implicit perceptual learning. EEG responses to deviant and standard sounds were registered while subjects were alone (Solo condition) or together (Other condition) with a virtual avatar (Virtual scenario) or physically present confederate (Physical scenario). We found an overall main effect of co-presence on MMN revealed by a point-by-point 2 × 2 ANOVA, thereby replicating previous studies on physical co-presence. Additionally, we found no significant interaction between the scenario (Physical vs. Virtual) and co-presence (Solo vs. Other). Our results indicate that virtual immersive co-presence mimics physical co-presence.

Real-time diagnosis of intracerebral hemorrhage by generating dual-energy CT from single-energy CT.

Real-time diagnosis of intracerebral hemorrhage after thrombectomy is crucial for follow-up treatment. However, this is difficult to achieve with standard single-energy CT (SECT) due to similar CT values of blood and contrast agents under a single energy spectrum. In contrast, dual-energy CT (DECT) scanners employ two different energy spectra, which allows for real-time differentiation between hemorrhage and contrast extravasation based on energy-related attenuation characteristics. Unfortunately, DECT scanners are not as widely used as SECT scanners due to their high costs. To address this dilemma, in this paper, we generate pseudo DECT images from a SECT image for real-time diagnosis of hemorrhage. More specifically, we propose a SECT-to-DECT Transformer-based Generative Adversarial Network (SDTGAN), which is a 3D transformer-based multi-task learning framework equipped with a shared attention mechanism. In this way, SDTGAN can be guided to focus more on high-density areas (crucial for hemorrhage diagnosis) during the generation. Meanwhile, the introduced multi-task learning strategy and the shared attention mechanism also enable SDTGAN to model dependencies between interconnected generation tasks, improving generation performance while significantly reducing model parameters and computational complexity. In the experiments, we approximate real SECT images using mixed 120kV images from DECT data to address the issue of not being able to obtain the true paired DECT and SECT data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDTGAN can generate DECT images better than state-of-the-art methods. The code of our implementation is available at https://github.com/jiang-cw/SDTGAN.

Infants differentiate between successful and failed communication in a false-belief context.

Communication is based on social interaction, that is, interlocutors sharing attention to the intentions that they communicate about. In this study, we asked whether infants are aware of the fact that for information to be transferred, both interlocutors need to be present and share attention. Using a violation-of-expectation paradigm created to test infants' understanding of others' false beliefs, we asked whether 18-month-olds (n = 84) understood that correcting an agent's false belief via communication requires that the agent discerns the verbal statement. Participants saw how an agent put a toy into a box and left. An assistant then moved the toy into a cup. The intervention phase varied between three conditions: The agent and the assistant communicated about the actual location of the toy (full-communication), the agent was absent during the assistant's statement (incomplete-communication) or no communication took place (no-communication). At test, the agent reached into either the box or the cup. When no communication took place, infants expected the agent to search the toy at the original location. Full communication resulted in infants' expectations that the recipient's actions were altered, that is, the infants expected her to search the toy at the actual location. In contrast, incomplete communication did not yield clear expectations. Eighteen-month-olds thus seem to understand that for information to be transferred, it is a precondition that the recipient of the communicative act must be present and share attention during the communicator's statement. Only then communication can change a recipient's mental state.

From Gaze Perception to Social Cognition: The Shared-Attention System.

When two people look at the same object in the environment and are aware of each other's attentional state, they find themselves in a shared-attention episode. This can occur through intentional or incidental signaling and, in either case, causes an exchange of information between the two parties about the environment and each other's mental states. In this article, we give an overview of what is known about the building blocks of shared attention (gaze perception and joint attention) and focus on bringing to bear new findings on the initiation of shared attention that complement knowledge about gaze following and incorporate new insights from research into the sense of agency. We also present a neurocognitive model, incorporating first-, second-, and third-order social cognitive processes (the shared-attention system, or SAS), building on previous models and approaches. The SAS model aims to encompass perceptual, cognitive, and affective processes that contribute to and follow on from the establishment of shared attention. These processes include fundamental components of social cognition such as reward, affective evaluation, agency, empathy, and theory of mind.

Learning of spatial configurations of a co-actor's attended objects in joint visual search.

Regarding the effects of joint action on visual memory, previous research has focused on the memory of a single object that a participant and their co-actor attended together (i.e., a shared situation), while the literature on memory has demonstrated that spatial regularity composed of multiple objects can also be learned. We aimed to examine whether the visuospatial regularity of the co-actor's attended objects could be strongly encoded. We repeatedly presented the same configuration of two targets and two sets of distractors in different colors (i.e., blue and red) to participants. In Experiment 1, pairs of participants simultaneously searched for the same target in the joint group while individual participants searched for the target alone in the single group. As a result, greater facilitation in reaction time was observed in earlier epochs in the joint group, reinforced by the learning of visuospatial regularity, compared to the single group. Experiment 2 examined whether the co-actor's attended context could be strongly encoded although two persons simultaneously searched for different targets (i.e., parallel situation) such that one searched for the blue target and the other for the red target. The results showed no evidence regarding participants' learning visuospatial regularity of the co-actor's attended objects, indicating that co-actor's learning information cannot be shared in this situation. This study revealed that facilitation of visuospatial learning in joint action would require two individuals to attend to the same objects when they perform the task.

Identifying when children with visual impairment share attention: A novel protocol and the impact of visual acuity.

BACKGROUND: In Coordinated Joint Engagement (CJE), children acknowledge that they and their social partners are paying attention to the same object. The achievement of CJE, critical for healthy development, is at risk in infants with visual impairment (VI). Research on CJE in these children is limited because investigators use a child's gaze switch between social partner and object to index CJE. Research is needed that identifies CJE in children with VI using behaviors that do not require normal vision and that explores the relationship between CJE and visual function. This study aimed to (a) develop a protocol for identifying CJE in children with VI, and (b) explore the relationship between CJE and infants' visual acuity (VA) and contrast sensitivity (CS), measured with Preferential Looking (PL) techniques and Visual Evoked Potential (VEP). METHODS: A protocol that included 9 indices of CJE that did not require normal vision was developed to code videos of 20 infants with VI (mean age =1 year, 6 months, 27 days) and their caregivers. The percentage of CJE episodes in which each index was observed was calculated. Inter-coder reliability was measured using Cohen's Kappa. Linear regression analysis was used to examine the relationship between the infants' visual function and CJE. RESULTS: Inter-rater reliability between a first coder and each of two second coders were 0.98 and 0.90 for determining whether the child participated in CJE. The following indices were observed the most (in 43-62 % of CJE): child's body orientation to caregiver, gaze switch between caregiver and object, and vocalization to caregiver. The only significant model included VA (measured with PL) as a single predictor and explained 26.8 % of the variance in CJE. CONCLUSIONS: The novel protocol can be used to identify CJE in children with VI with good inter-coder reliability. The data suggest that children with lower VA exhibited less CJE.

Artificially elevated oxytocin concentrations in pet dogs are associated with higher proximity-maintenance and gazing towards the owners.

The relationship between dogs and their owners is characterized by an affective and enduring bond. It has been suggested that oxytocin might be the underlying mechanism driving this relationship, however evidence is mixed. In this study we tested whether intranasally administered oxytocin (compared to saline) would influence dogs' behavioural synchrony and shared attention towards their owners. Each individuals' pre and post administration oxytocin concentrations (measured in urine) were included in the analyses. Urinary oxytocin concentrations after administrations were positively associated with dogs' duration of social proximity and looking behaviours towards their owners supporting the role of oxytocin in modulating dogs' human-directed social behaviours.

What Makes Eye Contact Special? Neural Substrates of On-Line Mutual Eye-Gaze: A Hyperscanning fMRI Study.

Automatic mimicry is a critical element of social interaction. A salient type of automatic mimicry is eye contact characterized by sharing of affective and mental states among individuals. We conducted a hyperscanning functional magnetic resonance imaging study involving on-line (LIVE) and delayed off-line (REPLAY) conditions to test our hypothesis that recurrent interaction through eye contact activates the limbic mirror system, including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and anterior insular cortex (AIC), both of which are critical for self-awareness. Sixteen pairs of human adults participated in the experiment. Given that an eye-blink represents an individual's attentional window toward the partner, we analyzed pairwise time-series data for eye-blinks. We used multivariate autoregression analysis to calculate the noise contribution ratio (NCR) as an index of how a participant's directional attention was influenced by that of their partner. NCR was greater in the LIVE than in the REPLAY condition, indicating mutual perceptual-motor interaction during real-time eye contact. Relative to the REPLAY condition, the LIVE condition was associated with greater activation in the left cerebellar hemisphere, vermis, and ACC, accompanied by enhanced functional connectivity between ACC and right AIC. Given the roles of the cerebellum in sensorimotor prediction and ACC in movement initiation, ACC-cerebellar activation may represent their involvement in modulating visual input related to the partner's movement, which may, in turn, involve the limbic mirror system. Our findings indicate that mutual interaction during eye contact is mediated by the cerebellum and limbic mirror system.

Exploring the Cognitive Foundations of the Shared Attention Mechanism: Evidence for a Relationship Between Self-Categorization and Shared Attention Across the Autism Spectrum.

The social difficulties of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are typically explained as a disruption in the Shared Attention Mechanism (SAM) sub-component of the theory of mind (ToM) system. In the current paper, we explore the hypothesis that SAM's capacity to construct the self-other-object relations necessary for shared-attention arises from a self-categorization process, which is weaker among those with more autistic-like traits. We present participants with self-categorization and shared-attention tasks, and measure their autism-spectrum quotient (AQ). Results reveal a negative relationship between AQ and shared-attention, via self-categorization, suggesting a role for self-categorization in the disruption in SAM seen in ASD. Implications for intervention, and for a ToM model in which weak central coherence plays a role are discussed.

Observing Third-Party Attentional Relationships Affects Infants' Gaze Following: An Eye-Tracking Study.

Not only responding to direct social actions toward themselves, infants also pay attention to relevant information from third-party interactions. However, it is unclear whether and how infants recognize the structure of these interactions. The current study aimed to investigate how infants' observation of third-party attentional relationships influence their subsequent gaze following. Nine-month-old, 1-year-old, and 1.5-year-old infants (N = 72, 37 girls) observed video clips in which a female actor gazed at one of two toys after she and her partner either silently faced each other (face-to-face condition) or looked in opposite directions (back-to-back condition). An eye tracker was used to record the infants' looking behavior (e.g., looking time, looking frequency). The analyses revealed that younger infants followed the actor's gaze toward the target object in both conditions, but this was not the case for the 1.5-year-old infants in the back-to-back condition. Furthermore, we found that infants' gaze following could be negatively predicted by their expectation of the partner's response to the actor's head turn (i.e., they shift their gaze toward the partner immediately after they realize that the actor's head will turn). These findings suggested that the sensitivity to the difference in knowledge and attentional states in the second year of human life could be extended to third-party interactions, even without any direct involvement in the situation. Additionally, a spontaneous concern with the epistemic gap between self and other, as well as between others, develops by this age. These processes might be considered part of the fundamental basis for human communication.

Shared Attention.

Shared attention is extremely common. In stadiums, public squares, and private living rooms, people attend to the world with others. Humans do so across all sensory modalities-sharing the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and textures of everyday life with one another. The potential for attending with others has grown considerably with the emergence of mass media technologies, which allow for the sharing of attention in the absence of physical co-presence. In the last several years, studies have begun to outline the conditions under which attending together is consequential for human memory, motivation, judgment, emotion, and behavior. Here, I advance a psychological theory of shared attention, defining its properties as a mental state and outlining its cognitive, affective, and behavioral consequences. I review empirical findings that are uniquely predicted by shared-attention theory and discuss the possibility of integrating shared-attention, social-facilitation, and social-loafing perspectives. Finally, I reflect on what shared-attention theory implies for living in the digital world.

Predictors of parent-child interaction style in dyads with autism.

Parent synchrony has been shown to be developmentally important for the growth of communication skills in young children with autism. Understanding individual-differences in parent synchrony and other associated features of dyadic interaction therefore presents as an important step toward the goal of appreciating how and why some parent-child dyads come to adopt more optimal interaction styles, while for others, parent interaction is more asynchronous and less developmentally facilitative. Within the large, well-characterized Preschool Autism Communication Trial (PACT) cohort, baseline parent-child interaction samples were coded for three key aspects of dyadic interaction style; - Parent Synchrony, Child Initiation, and Shared Attention. We explored associations among these measures, demographic characteristics and standardized child assessment scores. While various child factors were associated with each of the interaction measures, very few associations were observed with parent/familial factors. Child language age-equivalence was a significant positive predictor of variation in each interaction measure, while child repetitive symptoms predicted reduced Shared Attention. The three interaction measures were moderately positively inter-related. In the context of childhood autism, variation in dyadic interaction style appears to be driven more by child language and repetitive behaviors than age, social-communication symptoms and non-verbal ability. Parent/family factors contributed little to explaining variability in parent-child interaction, in the current study.

Relación entre atención compartida madre-hijo, sensibilidad materna y expresión emocional gestual infantil / Relação entre atenção compartilhada mãe-filho, sensibilidade materna e expressão emocional gestual infantil / Relationship between mother-child shared attention, maternal sensitivity and infant emotional gestural expression

Resumen La atención compartida se refiere a episodios en los que el niño y su cuidador están enfocados intencionalmente en algún objeto o actividad, presentando intercambios físicos y emocionales. En este estudio se describió la atención compartida considerando las dimensiones de nivel de compromiso y tono emocional, y se analizó su relación con la sensibilidad materna y la intensidad de la expresión emocional gestual de niños de un año de edad. La muestra estuvo compuesta por 12 díadas madre-hijo, donde se consideró como criterios de inclusión que los niños tuvieran entre 12 y 14 meses de edad, que fueran hijos únicos, que vivieran con ambos padres, y que asistieran a sala cuna. Los instrumentos utilizados fueron la Evaluación de Atención Compartida, la Evaluación de la Expresión Emocional Gestual del Niño y la Escala de Sensibilidad del Adulto. Los resultados evidencian episodios de atención compartida en díadas madre-hijo al año de edad, además de una relación significativa entre atención compartida con el nivel de compromiso y la sensibilidad materna.

Resumo A atenção compartilhada refere-se a episódios nos quais a criança e seu cuidador estão focados intencionalmente em algum objeto ou atividade, apresentando trocas físicas e emocionais. Neste estudo, a atenção compartilhada foi descrita considerando as dimensões de nível de compromisso e tom emocional, e foi analisada sua relação com a sensibilidade materna e com a intensidade da expressão emocional gestual de crianças de um ano de idade. A amostra estava composta por 12 duplas mãe-filho, cujos critérios de inclusão eram que as crianças tivessem entre 12 e 14 meses de idade, que fossem filhos únicos, que vivessem com ambos os pais e que frequentassem o berçário. Os instrumentos utilizados foram a Avaliação de Atenção Compartilhada, a Avaliação da Expressão Emocional Gestual da Criança e a Escala de Sensibilidade do Adulto. Os resultados evidenciam episódios de atenção compartilhada em duplas mãe-filho com um ano de idade, além de uma relação significativa entre atenção compartilhada com o nível de compromisso e a sensibilidade materna.

Abstract Shared attention refers to episodes through which a child and his or her caretaker are intentionally focused on some object or activity while engaging in physical and emotional exchange. This study describes shared attention bearing in mind levels of commitment and emotional tone, and it analyzes associated relationships with maternal sensitivity and the intensity of emotional expression in one-year-old children. The sample includes 12 mother-child dyads with the following inclusion criteria: only children, of ages between 12 and 14 months, living with both parents and attending a nursery. The instruments used were the Shared Attention Assessment, the Children's Emotional Expressions Assessment, and the Adult Sensitivity Scale (ASS). Results show episodes of shared attention between mother-child dyads at one year of age. A significant relationship between shared attention, levels of commitment, and maternal sensitivity was also found.