Dear all,

Our next Cognitive Area Seminar talk will be this *Friday, October 14, 3:30 - 5 PM *(Room S3/4, Stewart Biology Building, 1205 Docteur Penfield Avenue).

The talk will be given by Dr. Francesca Capozzi (post-doc, Ristic Lab), and is titled:

*"Social Attention: The complexities of a simple mechanism" *

For a full abstract, see below the dashed line.

Please join us at this event!

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SOCIAL ATTENTION: THE COMPLEXITIES OF A SIMPLE MECHANISM

Francesca Capozzi & Jelena Ristic, Department of Psychology, McGill University

Social attention refers to changes in attention that occur as a result of information conveyed by other *agents*, and as such it is a fundamental building block of non-verbal communication. Social attention includes social orienting of attention in response to directional as well communicative signals conveyed by other people, such as following the gaze of another agent to look where they are looking. Currently, the field of social attention is facing the dissatisfaction due to the lack of a theoretical framework that can account for the complexity of social attention mechanisms that allow humans to interact in complex social scenarios. Building on the most recent behavioral and brain findings, we outline a perspective about how social attention depends on and influences three different levels of interdependent processes – Perception, Mentalizing, and Evaluation. In the *perception* route, the stimulus (i.e., a gazing face) and its properties (i.e., a directional gaze shift) are perceived and connected with spatial attention systems. The full social appraisal of the stimulus occurs in the *mentalizing* route, in which the perceiver attributes mental states to other agents, forming both generic mental states (e.g., the face attended is actually able to see something) and more specific mental states, such as emotions. Finally, the attribution of mental states flows through the *evaluation* route, in which the perceiver evaluates the relative importance of the social information, based on their current goals, the environment, and the number of other agents. In this novel perspective, social attention is seen as a complex mechanism which depends both on individual and contextual factors.