Elina Birmingham

Gaze selection in complex social scenes

A great deal of recent research has sought to understand the factors and neural systems that mediate the orienting of spatial attention to a gazed-at location. What have rarely been examined, however, are the factors that are critical to the initial selection of gaze information from complex visual scenes. For instance, is gaze prioritized relative to other possible body parts and objects within a scene? The present study springboards from the seminal work of Yarbus (1965/1967), who had originally examined participants’ scan paths while they viewed visual scenes containing one or more people. His work suggested to us that the selection of gaze information may depend on the task that is assigned to participants, the social content of the scene, and/or the activity level depicted within the scene. Our results show clearly that all of these factors can significantly modulate the selection of gaze information. Specifically, the selection of gaze was enhanced when the task was to describe the social attention within a scene, and when the social content and activity level in a scene were high. Nevertheless, it is also the case that participants always selected gaze information more than any other stimulus. Our study has broad implications for future investigations of social attention as well as resolving a number of longstanding issues that had undermined the classic original work of Yarbus.

Social attention and real-world scenes: The roles of action, competition and social content

The present study examined how social attention is influenced by social content and the presence of items that are available for attention. We monitored observers’ eye movements while they freely viewed real-world social scenes containing either 1 or 3 people situated among a variety of objects. Building from the work of Yarbus (1965/1967) we hypothesized that observers would demonstrate a preferential bias to fixate the eyes of the people in the scene, although other items would also receive attention. In addition, we hypothesized that fixations to the eyes would increase as the social content (i.e., number of people) increased. Both hypotheses were supported by the data, and we also found that the level of activity in the scene influenced attention to eyes when social content was high. The present results provide support for the notion that the eyes are selected by others in order to extract social information. Our study also suggests a simple and surreptitious methodology for studying social attention to real-world stimuli in a range of populations, such as those with autism spectrum disorders.

Human Social Attention

The present review examines the neural‐behavioral correlates of human social attention, with special regard to the neural mechanisms involved in processing gaze information and the functional impact of gaze direction on the spatial orienting of attention. Our review suggests that there is strong evidence that specific brain systems are preferentially biased toward processing gaze information, yet this specificity is not mirrored by the behavioral data as measured in highly controlled model attention tasks such as the Posner cueing paradigm. In less controlled tasks, however, such as when observers are left free to select what they want to attend, they focus on people and their eyes, consistent with ones intuition and with the neural evidence that eyes are special. We discuss a range of implications of these data, including that much is to be gained by examining brain and behavioral processes to social stimuli as they occur in complex real‐world settings.

Get real! Resolving the debate about equivalent social stimuli

Gaze and arrow studies of spatial orienting have shown that eyes and arrows produce nearly identical effects on shifts of spatial attention. This has led some researchers to suggest that the human attention system considers eyes and arrows as equivalent social stimuli. However, this view does not fit with the general intuition that eyes are unique social stimuli nor does it agree with a large body of work indicating that humans possess a neural system that is preferentially biased to process information regarding human gaze. To shed light on this discrepancy we entertained the idea that the model cueing task may fail to measure some of the ways that eyes are special. Thus rather than measuring the orienting of attention to a location cued by eyes and arrows, we measured the selection of eyes and arrows embedded in complex real-world scenes. The results were unequivocal: People prefer to look at other people and their eyes; they rarely attend to arrows. This outcome was not predicted by visual saliency but it was predicted by the idea that eyes are social stimuli that are prioritized by the attention system. These data, and the paradigm from which they were derived, shed new light on past cueing studies of social attention, and they suggest a new direction for future investigations of social attention.

Comparing social attention in autism and amygdala lesions: Effects of stimulus and task condition

The amygdala plays a critical role in orienting gaze and attention to socially salient stimuli. Previous work has demonstrated that SM a patient with rare bilateral amygdala lesions, fails to fixate and make use of information from the eyes in faces. Amygdala dysfunction has also been implicated as a contributing factor in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), consistent with some reports of reduced eye fixations in ASD. Yet, detailed comparisons between ASD and patients with amygdala lesions have not been undertaken. Here we carried out such a comparison, using eye tracking to complex social scenes that contained faces. We presented participants with three task conditions. In the Neutral task, participants had to determine what kind of room the scene took place in. In the Describe task, participants described the scene. In the Social Attention task, participants inferred where people in the scene were directing their attention. SM spent less time looking at the eyes and much more time looking at the mouths than control subjects, consistent with earlier findings. There was also a trend for the ASD group to spend less time on the eyes, although this depended on the particular image and task. Whereas controls and SM looked more at the eyes when the task required social attention, the ASD group did not. This pattern of impairments suggests that SM looks less at the eyes because of a failure in stimulus-driven attention to social features, whereas individuals with ASD look less at the eyes because they are generally insensitive to socially relevant information and fail to modulate attention as a function of task demands. We conclude that the source of the social attention impairment in ASD may arise upstream from the amygdala, rather than in the amygdala itself.

At-a-Glance Monitoring: Covert Observations of Anesthesiologists in the Operating Room

BACKGROUND: Patient monitoring displays are designed to improve patient safety, and yet little is known about how anesthesiologists interact with these displays. Previous studies of clinician behavior used an observer in the operating room, which may have altered behavior. We describe a covert observation technique to determine how often and for how long anesthesiologists actually look at the monitoring display during different segments of the maintenance phase of anesthesia, and to determine whether this changed with more than 1 anesthesia provider or during concomitant activities such as reading. METHODS: Five staff anesthesiologists, 2 anesthesia fellows, 3 anesthesia residents, and 2 medical students were covertly videotaped across 10 dual anesthesia provider cases and 10 solo cases. Videotapes were later segmented (5 minutes postinduction [early maintenance], mid-maintenance, and immediately before the drapes came down [late maintenance]) and coded for looking behavior at the patient monitor, anesthesia chart, and other reading material. RESULTS: Anesthesiologists looked at the monitor in 1- to 2-second glances, performed frequently throughout the 3 segments of maintenance anesthesia. Overall, the patient monitor was looked at only 5 of the analyzed time, which is less than has previously been reported. Monitoring behavior was constant across the segments of maintenance anesthesia and was not significantly affected by the number of anesthesia providers or role (trainee vs. senior). In contrast, charting behavior and other reading material viewing changed significantly over the analyzed segments of maintenance anesthesia. CONCLUSIONS: The presence of “at-a-glance monitoring” has implications for the design of patient monitoring displays. Displays should be developed to optimize the information obtained from brief glances at the monitor.

Human social attention

The present chapter suggests that while there is strong evidence that specific brain systems are preferentially biased toward processing gaze information, this specificity is not mirrored by the behavioral data as measured in highly controlled impoverished model tasks. In less controlled tasks, however, such as when observers are left free to look at whatever they want in complex natural scenes, observers focus on people and their eyes. This agrees with ones intuition, and with the neural evidence, that eyes are special. We discuss the implications of these data, including that there is much to be gained by examining brain and behavioral processes to social stimuli as they occur in complex real-world settings.

Inhibition of return: Unraveling a paradox

Although inhibition of return (IOR) is widely believed to aid search by discouraging reexamination of previously inspected locations, its impact actually appears to decline as the number of target locations increases. We test three possible reasons for this paradoxical result: (1) IOR is capacity-limited, (2) IOR is sensitive to subtle changes in target location probability, and (3) IOR decays with distance from a previously attended location. The present investigation provides strong support for the third explanation, indicating that a gradient of inhibition is centered on previously attended locations. We note that this inhibitory gradient resolves a paradox in the literature. Moreover, we speculate that the inhibitory gradient may reflect a “similarity space” within which target locations near to the cue are tagged with inhibition due to their similarity to the cued location. The farther the target location is away, the less similar it is to the cued location, and thus the less inhibition it receives.

Alexithymia, but not autism spectrum disorder, may be related to the production of emotional facial expressions

BackgroundA prominent diagnostic criterion of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) relates to the abnormal or diminished use of facial expressions. Yet little is known about the mechanisms that contribute to this feature of ASD.MethodsWe showed children with and without ASD emotionally charged video clips in order to parse out individual differences in spontaneous production of facial expressions using automated facial expression analysis software.ResultsUsing hierarchical multiple regression, we sought to determine whether alexithymia (characterized by difficulties interpreting one’s own feeling states) contributes to diminished facial expression production. Across groups, alexithymic traits—but not ASD traits, IQ, or sex—were associated with quantity of facial expression production.ConclusionsThese results accord with a growing body of research suggesting that many emotion processing abnormalities observed in ASD may be explained by co-occurring alexithymia. Developmental and clinical considerations are discussed, and it is argued that alexithymia is an important but too often ignored trait associated with ASD that may have implications for subtyping individuals on the autism spectrum.

Mentoring University Students with ASD: A Mentee-centered Approach

This study presents a conceptual understanding of how mentorship is experienced by the participants of a mentorship program for university students with Autism Spectrum Disorder. We interviewed the participants of the Autism Mentorship Initiative at Simon Fraser University. A grounded theory approach was used to systematically organize data from interviews and documents to reveal themes that were salient to the mentees (students with autism; n = 9) and mentors (neurotypical students; n = 9). The following five main themes were identified and interrelated under the core theme of A Mentee-centered Approach: (1) The Natural Progression of the Relationship, (2) The Supportive Mentor, (3) The Meeting Process, (4) Identifying and Implementing Goals, and (5) Learning Together. An in-depth analysis of a mentorship process is described.