Kuang Shenbing
State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China.
Front Psychol. 2016 Feb 1;7:63. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00063. eCollection 2016.
Social attention is one special form of attention that involves the allocation of limited processing resources in a social context. Previous studies on social attention often regard how attention is directed toward socially relevant stimuli such as faces and gaze directions of other individuals. In contrast to attending-to-others, a different line of researches has shown that self-related information such as own face and name automatically captures attention and is preferentially processed comparing to other-related information. These contrasting behavioral effects between attending-to-others and attending-to-self prompt me to consider a synthetic viewpoint for understanding social attention. I propose that social attention operates at two polarizing states: In one extreme, individual tends to attend to the self and prioritize self-related information over others', and, in the other extreme, attention is allocated to other individuals to infer their intentions and desires. Attending-to-self and attending-to-others mark the two ends of an otherwise continuum spectrum of social attention. For a given behavioral context, the mechanisms underlying these two polarities will interact and compete with each other in order to determine a saliency map of social attention that guides our behaviors. An imbalanced competition between these two behavioral and cognitive processes will cause cognitive disorders and neurological symptoms such as autism spectrum disorders and Williams syndrome. I have reviewed both behavioral and neural evidence that support the notion of polarized social attention, and have suggested several testable predictions to corroborate this integrative theory for understanding social attention.
社会注意力是注意力的一种特殊形式，它涉及在社会情境中有限加工资源的分配。以往关于社会注意力的研究通常关注注意力如何指向与社会相关的刺激，如他人的面部和注视方向。与关注他人不同，另一系列研究表明，诸如自己的面部和名字等与自我相关的信息会自动吸引注意力，并且与其他相关信息相比，会得到优先加工。关注他人和关注自我之间这些相互矛盾的行为效应促使我考虑一种综合的观点来理解社会注意力。我提出社会注意力在两种极化状态下运作：在一个极端情况下，个体倾向于关注自我，并将与自我相关的信息置于他人相关信息之上；而在另一个极端情况下，注意力被分配给其他个体以推断他们的意图和欲望。关注自我和关注他人标志着社会注意力连续谱的两端。对于给定的行为情境，这两种极性背后的机制将相互作用和竞争，以确定引导我们行为的社会注意力显著性图谱。这两种行为和认知过程之间的不平衡竞争将导致认知障碍和神经症状，如自闭症谱系障碍和威廉姆斯综合征。我回顾了支持极化社会注意力概念的行为和神经证据，并提出了几个可检验的预测，以证实这种用于理解社会注意力的综合理论。
