Joint Attention, Social-Cognition, and Recognition Memory in Adults

The early emerging capacity for Joint Attention (JA), or socially coordinated visual attention, is thought to be integral to the development of social-cognition in childhood. Recent studies have also begun to suggest that JA affects adult cognition as well, but methodological limitations hamper research on this topic. To address this issue we developed a novel virtual reality paradigm that integrates eye-tracking and virtual avatar technology to measure two types of JA in adults, Initiating Joint Attention (IJA) and Responding to Joint Attention (RJA). Distinguishing these types of JA in research is important because they are thought to reflect unique, as well as common constellations of processes involved in human social-cognition and social learning. We tested the validity of the differentiation of IJA and RJA in our paradigm in two studies of picture recognition memory in undergraduate students. Study 1 indicated that young adults correctly identified more pictures they had previously viewed in an IJA condition (67%) than in a RJA (58%) condition, η2 = 0.57. Study 2 controlled for IJA and RJA stimulus viewing time differences, and replicated the findings of Study 1. The implications of these results for the validity of the paradigm and research on the affects of JA on adult social-cognition are discussed.

[1]  P. Mundy.  Joint attention and social-emotional approach behavior in children with autism , 1995, Development and Psychopathology.

[2]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Connectionist models of development , 2003 .

[3]  Nadim Joni Shah,et al.  Minds Made for Sharing: Initiating Joint Attention Recruits Reward-related Neurocircuitry , 2010, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[4]  A. Kingstone,et al.  The eyes have it! Reflexive orienting is triggered by nonpredictive gaze , 1998 .

[5]  E. Maguire,et al.  The Human Hippocampus and Spatial and Episodic Memory , 2002, Neuron.

[6]  P. Mundy.  Annotation: the neural basis of social impairments in autism: the role of the dorsal medial-frontal cortex and anterior cingulate system. , 2003, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[7]  Stephanie Bradshaw,et al.  Joint attention social cues influence infant learning , 2006 .

[8]  S. Tipper,et al.  Gaze cueing of attention: visual attention, social cognition, and individual differences. , 2007, Psychological bulletin.

[9]  M. Tomasello,et al.  The emergence of social cognition in three young chimpanzees. , 2005, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[10]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition , 2005, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[11]  John O. Willis,et al.  Wide Range Assessment of Memory and Learning, Second Edition , 2008 .

[12]  S. Rousset,et al.  Egocentric-updating during navigation facilitates episodic memory retrieval. , 2009, Acta psychologica.

[13]  P. Mundy,et al.  Infant responding to joint attention, executive processes, and self-regulation in preschool children. , 2012, Infant behavior & development.

[14]  Georg Northoff,et al.  Self-referential processing in our brain—A meta-analysis of imaging studies on the self , 2006, NeuroImage.

[15]  Connie Kasari,et al.  Joint attention, developmental level, and symptom presentation in autism , 1994, Development and Psychopathology.

[16]  Peter Mundy,et al.  Infant joint attention, neural networks and social cognition , 2010, Neural Networks.

[17]  R N Henson,et al.  Depth of processing effects on neural correlates of memory encoding: relationship between findings from across- and within-task comparisons. , 2001, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[18]  P. Mundy,et al.  EEG correlates of the development of infant joint attention skills. , 2000, Developmental psychobiology.

[19]  J. Halperin,et al.  Does the emotional go/no-go task really measure behavioral inhibition? Convergence with measures on a non-emotional analog. , 2007, Archives of clinical neuropsychology : the official journal of the National Academy of Neuropsychologists.

[20]  Jae-Hun Kim,et al.  Characteristics of Social Perception Assessed in Schizophrenia Using Virtual Reality , 2007, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[21]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Selective prefrontal cortex responses to joint attention in early infancy , 2010, Biology Letters.

[22]  G. Butterworth,et al.  What minds have in common is space : Spatial mechanisms serving joint visual attention in infancy , 1991 .

[23]  D. Perrett,et al.  Opinion TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.8 No.11 November 2004 Demystifying social cognition: a Hebbian perspective , 2022 .

[24]  David I. Perrett,et al.  An fMRI study of joint attention experience , 2005, NeuroImage.

[25]  C. Kasari,et al.  Joint attention and symbolic play in young children with autism: a randomized controlled intervention study. , 2006, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[26]  H Stanislaw,et al.  Calculation of signal detection theory measures , 1999, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[27]  S. Carey.  Becoming a face expert. , 1992, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences.

[28]  P. Mundy,et al.  Self-referenced memory, social cognition, and symptom presentation in autism. , 2009, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[29]  Harold Bekkering,et al.  Grasping the other’s attention: The role of animacy in action cueing of joint attention , 2011, Vision Research.

[30]  Stefanie Hoehl,et al.  Neural mechanisms of joint attention in infancy , 2006, The European journal of neuroscience.

[31]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Developing a brain specialized for face perception: a converging methods approach. , 2002, Developmental psychobiology.

[32]  Masako Hirotani,et al.  Joint attention helps infants learn new words: event-related potential evidence , 2009, Neuroreport.

[33]  A. Neal,et al.  Infant joint attention, temperament, and social competence in preschool children. , 2007, Child development.

[34]  Günther Knoblich,et al.  Giving a helping hand: effects of joint attention on mental rotation of body parts , 2011, Experimental Brain Research.

[35]  Blair T. Johnson,et al.  The self-reference effect in memory: a meta-analysis. , 1997, Psychological bulletin.

[36]  Matthew A. Paul,et al.  Gaze cuing and affective judgments of objects: I like what you look at , 2006, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[37]  Clay B. Holroyd,et al.  The neural basis of human error processing: reinforcement learning, dopamine, and the error-related negativity. , 2002, Psychological review.

[38]  C. Moore,et al.  Joint attention : its origins and role in development , 1995 .

[39]  J G Snodgrass,et al.  Perceptual Identification Thresholds for 150 Fragmented Pictures from the Snodgrass and Vanderwart Picture Set , 1988, Perceptual and motor skills.

[40]  Asaf Gilboa,et al.  Autobiographical and episodic memory—one and the same? Evidence from prefrontal activation in neuroimaging studies , 2004, Neuropsychologia.

[41]  R. Schultz.  Developmental deficits in social perception in autism: the role of the amygdala and fusiform face area , 2005, International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience.

[42]  A. Meltzoff,et al.  The importance of eyes: how infants interpret adult looking behavior. , 2002, Developmental psychology.

[43]  Rebecca Saxe,et al.  Live face-to-face interaction during fMRI: A new tool for social cognitive neuroscience , 2010, NeuroImage.

[44]  In-Young Kim,et al.  Development of a computer-based behavioral assessment of checking behavior in obsessive-compulsive disorder. , 2010, Comprehensive psychiatry.

[45]  M. Yale,et al.  Getting the point: electrophysiological correlates of protodeclarative pointing , 2002, International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience.

[46]  G. Winocur,et al.  In Search of the Self: A Positron Emission Tomography Study , 1999 .

[47]  I. Gauthier,et al.  Perceptual interference supports a non-modular account of face processing , 2003, Nature Neuroscience.

[48]  S. Tipper,et al.  Orienting attention via observed gaze shift evokes longer term inhibitory effects: implications for social interactions, attention, and memory. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[49]  P. Mundy,et al.  Assessing interactional competencies: The early social‐communication scales , 1982 .

[50]  A. Meltzoff,et al.  Self-experience as a mechanism for learning about others: a training study in social cognition. , 2008, Developmental psychology.