Reflexive Social Attention in Monkeys and Humans

This project investigates how our own attention is altered by seeing a person look in a particular direction. This gaze-following reflex is considered to be a precursor of more complex socio-cognitive abilities in humans, such as theory of mind.

As a first step in developing an animal model of this phenomenon, post-doctoral fellow Robert Deaner has shown that rhesus monkeys and humans show remarkably similar shifts of spatial attention when viewing a monkey looking to the left or right (Deaner and Platt, Current Biology, 2003). In our experiment, we found that subjects of both species more quickly looked towards a peripheral target if they had previously seen a monkey looking in that direction. Moreover, these socially-triggered shifts of attention were completely automatic. We believe that the data collected in this experiment constitute the strongest evidence so far that monkeys and humans rely on the same neural circuitry for reflexively deploying attention in social contexts.

The next step in our research is to explore the neural mechanisms underlying this gaze-following reflex by recording from neurons in the parietal cortex of monkeys while they perform the behavioral task outlined above. Parietal cortex is already known to be crucial for orienting spatial attention, especially in non-social contexts. However, it is unclear if social information, such as a directional gaze cue, is represented in parietal cortex or how such information might reach this area. Determining the neural mechanisms responsible for socially-triggered attention may one day help us to understand deficiencies in this behavior associated with autism and schizophrenia.