Dear AEPS students,
prof. Dimitri Ognibene invites you to attend the following departmental seminar. You can find information about the seminar below,
Kind regards,
Giulio Costantini
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Seminars at the Psychology Department of University of Milan-Bicocca ****************************************************** Tom Foulsham, University of Essex Social attention: From eyes to lies Tuesday 21 January 2025, 10.30 Sala Lauree Psicologia, U6 (3° piano)
A large body of research demonstrates that human faces attract attention when they appear in a picture or an experimental stimulus. However, when gaze is measured in real, face-to-face situations, people often avoid looking at others when not interacting, and they regularly make and break eye contact during conversation. I will describe studies from my lab which attempt to investigate this “social attention” in controlled experiments which replicate some of the features of real interactions. When observing pre-recorded conversation, participants spend most of the time fixating the person speaking, but they can also anticipate the change in speaker. This may be partly due to reading the cues provided by the people in the video (such as their gaze). We can manipulate these cues to study signalling in a naturalistic setting, and we have also shown nuanced differences in observers high in autistic and ADHD-related traits. Importantly, we also find a close correspondence between fixations on pre-recorded videos and the gaze displayed by participants in a real face-to-face interaction, which suggests a high level of ecological validity. I will also describe a different paradigm for studying gaze signalling, where the eye or head movements of one participant are re-played to another participant who must then make judgements about that person’s response. The results show that people are able to read the attention of others, but also that they can change their orienting in order to mislead an observer. Taken together, these studies show social attention operating in complex and dynamic situations. This involves orienting to pick up specific behavioural cues, as well as in order to communicate attention to others in the environment. ****************************************************** Dr Foulsham will be around till the 3rd of February |