Mechanisms of Attention

What are the mechanisms by which attention influences perception of simple and complex stimuli? We are interested in determining the behavioural and neural activity associated with pure measures of attentional selection and orienting. By using simple response-based tasks and EEG, we can examine the relative differences when attending to sensor events in order to better understand the basic mechanisms of human attention and their behavioural and neural correlates.

Dr. Chris Blair wearing an EEG recording device and participating in an EEG study.

Jessica Haight engaging in a dyadic interaction while wearing Tobii Pro mobile eye tracking glasses. The red circle is her partner's pupil fixation.

A heat map of eye movement and proportions data collected in Dr. Francesca Capozzi, Dr. Lauren Human, and Dr. Jelena Ristic's paper "Attention promotes accurate impression formation."

Social Attention

Research suggests that attention to social information is unique and distinct as compared to attention to other objects. In this manner, social attention can help us interpret social information by enabling the comprehension of subtle visual signals, e.g., eye gaze direction. We are investigating whether social attention is a unique process by examining its basic properties as well as its relationship with other social cognitive processes like group membership and identity.

Studying social attention also allows us to examine how we attend to social information in a real-world environment, rather than in a lab setting. We are using eye tracking to examine how we attend and respond to simple low-level stimuli or more complex everyday natural scenes and movie clips. By using this approach, we can estimate the units of social attention to understand the effects that environmental complexity has on social orienting.

A heat map of eye tracking data from Dr. Francesca Capozzi, Dr. Nida Latif, and Dr. Jelena Ristic's paper, "It's not all in the face: reduced face visibility does not modulate social attention."

Pierre-August Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party" painting illustrates differential social cues in a group interaction.

Monitoring the social attention of Dr. Jelena Ristic as she observes a group interaction on a screen.

Interactive Cognition

Schematic of a set up used to investigate social attention in complex interactions. From Dr. Francesca Capozzi et al's paper, "Tracking the Leader: Gaze Behavior in Group Interactions."

Dr. Francesca Capozzi (left), Dr. Jelena Ristic (middle), and Dr. Effie Pereira (right) engaging in a group interaction.

A social interaction with the participant's eyes being tracked with glasses (see arrow) from Dr. Francesca Capozzi and Dr. Jelena Ristic's paper, "How attention gates social interactions."