Lack of automatic attentional orienting by gaze cues following a bilateral loss of visual cortex

2014 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 75-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Burra ◽  
Dirk Kerzel ◽  
Beatrice de Gelder ◽  
Alan J. Pegna
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Attentional Orienting ◽  
Gaze Cues

Pre-exposure to ambiguous faces modulates top-down control of attentional orienting to counterpredictive gaze cues

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdulaziz Abubshait ◽  
Ali Momen ◽  
Eva Wiese
Keyword(s):  
Social Attention ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Attentional Orienting ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Gaze Cueing ◽  
Mind Perception ◽  
Attention Orienting ◽  
Human Likeness ◽  
Gaze Cues

Understanding and reacting to others’ nonverbal social signals, such as changes in gaze direction (i.e., gaze cue), is essential for social interactions, as its important for processes such as joint attention and mentalizing. Although attentional orienting in response to gaze cues has a strong reflexive component, accumulating evidence shows that it can be top-down controlled by context information regarding the signals’ social relevance. For example, when a gazer is believed to be an entity “with a mind” (i.e., mind perception), people exert more top-down control on attention orienting. Although increasing an agent’s physical human-likeness can enhance mind perception, it could have negative consequences on top-down control of social attention when a gazer’s physical appearance is categorically ambiguous (i.e., difficult to categorize as human or nonhuman), as resolving this ambiguity would require using cognitive resources that otherwise could be used to top-down control attention orienting. To examine this question, we used mouse-tracking to explore if categorically ambiguos agents are associated with increased processing costs (Experiment 1), whether categorically ambiguous stimuli negatively impact top-down control of social attention (Experiment 2) and if resolving the conflict related to the agent’s categorical ambiguity (using exposure) would restore top-down control to orient attention (Experiment 3). The findings suggest that categorically ambigious stimuli are associated with cognitive conflict, which negatively impact the ability to exert top-down control on attentional orienting in a counterpredicitive gaze cueing paradigm; this negative impact, however, is attenuated when being pre-exposed to the stimuli prior to the gaze cueing task. Taken together, these findings suggest that manipulating physical human-likeness is a powerful way to affect mind perception in human-robot interaction but has a diminishing returns effect on social attention when it is categorically ambiguous due to drainage of cognitive resources and impairment of top-down control.

scholarly journals Brain stimulation to left prefrontal cortex modulates attentional orienting to gaze cues

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1771) ◽  
pp. 20180430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Wiese ◽  
Abdulaziz Abubshait ◽  
Bobby Azarian ◽  
Eric J. Blumberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Social Attention ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Attentional Orienting ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Attention Task ◽  
Verbal Cues ◽  
Mind Perception ◽  
Internal States ◽  
Gaze Cues

In social interactions, we rely on non-verbal cues like gaze direction to understand the behaviour of others. How we react to these cues is determined by the degree to which we believe that they originate from an entity with a mind capable of having internal states and showing intentional behaviour, a process called mind perception . While prior work has established a set of neural regions linked to mind perception, research has just begun to examine how mind perception affects social-cognitive mechanisms like gaze processing on a neuronal level. In the current experiment, participants performed a social attention task (i.e. attentional orienting to gaze cues) with either a human or a robot agent (i.e. manipulation of mind perception) while transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) was applied to prefrontal and temporo-parietal brain areas. The results show that temporo-parietal stimulation did not modulate mechanisms of social attention, neither in response to the human nor in response to the robot agent, whereas prefrontal stimulation enhanced attentional orienting in response to human gaze cues and attenuated attentional orienting in response to robot gaze cues. The findings suggest that mind perception modulates low-level mechanisms of social cognition via prefrontal structures, and that a certain degree of mind perception is essential in order for prefrontal stimulation to affect mechanisms of social attention. This article is part of the theme issue ‘From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human–robot interaction’.

Reflexive attentional orienting in migraineurs: The behavioral implications of hyperexcitable visual cortex

Cephalalgia ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (16) ◽  
pp. 1642-1651 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marla JS Mickleborough ◽  
Jake Hayward ◽  
Christine Chapman ◽  
Janelle Chung ◽  
Todd C Handy
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Headache Disorder ◽  
Sudden Onset ◽  
Attentional Orienting ◽  
Reflexive Attention ◽  
Spatial Orienting ◽  
Visual Spatial ◽  
Spatial Cuing ◽  
Sensory Evoked ◽  
Visual Cortical

Introduction: Although migraine is classified as a headache disorder, a key part of migraine pathophysiology is a heightened excitability of visual cortices in between headache events. The goal of our study was to examine the behavioral impact of this visuocortical hyperexcitability, in terms of its effect on reflexive visual attentional orienting. Methods and results: In Experiment 1, using a non-predictive spatial cuing task that relied on sensory-evoked responses in the visual cortex for triggering attentional orienting, we found that migraineurs had greater attentional enhancement of manual target responses, relative to non-migraine controls. In two control experiments we confirmed that this heightened attention effect in migraineurs is not due to exaggerated reflexive orienting responses in general, but rather, it appears to be specifically associated with sensory-evoked attentional triggers. Discussion: Taken together, this confirms that the functional consequences of hyperexcitable visual cortex in migraineurs are not just purely sensory in nature, but directly impact at least some forms of reflexive attention. This provides evidence of at least one cognitive implication of hyperexcitable visual cortical responses in migraineurs, namely heightened reflexive visual-spatial orienting specific to sudden-onset peripheral events.

scholarly journals Eye-gaze cues evoke longer-term inhibitory effects of attentional orienting

2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (8) ◽  
pp. 832-832
Author(s):  
A. Frischen ◽  
S. P. Tipper
Keyword(s):  
Eye Gaze ◽  
Attentional Orienting ◽  
Inhibitory Effects ◽  
Gaze Cues

scholarly journals Brain stimulation to left prefrontal cortex modulates mechanisms of social attention

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Wiese ◽  
Aziz Abubshait ◽  
Bobby Azarian ◽  
Eric J. Blumberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Social Attention ◽  
Attentional Orienting ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Attention Task ◽  
Mind Perception ◽  
Intentional Behavior ◽  
Internal States ◽  
Post Hoc ◽  
Gaze Cues

In social interactions, we rely on nonverbal cues like gaze direction to understand the behavior of others. How we react to these cues is determined by the degree to which we believe that they originate from an entity with a mind capable of having internal states and showing intentional behavior, a process called mind perception. While prior work has established a set of neural regions linked to mind perception, research has just begun to examine how mind perception affects social-cognitive mechanisms like gaze processing on a neuronal level. In the current experiment, participants performed a social attention task (i.e., attentional orienting to gaze cues) with either a human or a robot agent (i.e., variation of mind perception), while transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) was applied either to prefrontal or temporo-parietal areas, both regions that have been linked to mind perception in previous studies. The results show that stimulation to temporo-parietal areas did not modulate social attention, neither in response to the human nor the robot agent. In contrast, stimulation to prefrontal areas enhanced attentional orienting in response to hu-man gaze cues and attenuated attentional orienting in response to robot gaze cues. Post-hoc analyses revealed that prefrontal stimulation particularly affected those participants who have followed human gaze more strongly than robot gaze at baseline. These findings suggest that mind perception modulates low-level mechanisms of social cognition via pre-frontal structures, and that a certain degree of mind perception is essential in order to benefit from active stimulation to prefrontal areas.

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