Using Gaze to study Social Knowledge: Current Challenges and Future Directions

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Background

As a species, we as humans rely strongly on the visual modality for navigating the world, so it is no surprise that a focus on visual responses has become prevalent in the field of cognition. This is especially relevant when studying cognitive processes amongst nonverbal subjects such as infants and many animal species. Such studies examine how participants inspect stimuli, exhibit anticipation, or visually respond to expectation violation. The goal of these approaches is to examine what information subjects attend to, and to draw inferences about physical and social knowledge in the studied species.

Yet it is not always clear what underlying mechanisms motivate a visual bias, and how such data translates to interpretations of real-world responses. This is especially problematic for understanding social behaviour, since social cognition is often studied in experimental settings without broader behavioural validation.

In experiments that use gaze to study social responses, visual bias to a stimulus can be interpreted within different frameworks. In violation of expectation studies, longer gaze to a stimulus that is considered to violate social expectations is interpreted as ‘surprise’, but such predictions do not necessarily pan out. Conversely, visual bias can also be interpreted as preference or recognition, such as during paired-image presentation, even though studies report varying results for whether, for example, a species looks longer at a familiar or unfamiliar stimulus. Whilst a few studies have addressed the behavioural correlates of visual attention, it is clear that more work is needed in order to understand the motivations for visual bias, and how test measures translate to real-world responses.

This is particularly true for understanding social cognition, since a comparative understanding of social knowledge is not only key to advance theories of cognitive evolution, but also to adjust management and husbandry conditions for animals kept under human care. Furthermore, there may be technological advances that could improve our ability to ‘read the mind in the eyes’ that have yet to be fully adopted.

The goal of this research topic is to explore theoretical and empirical assessments of visual attention from a multidisciplinary perspective, with the aim of strengthening methodological approaches and thereby improving data interpretation.

This research topic welcomes contributions from the fields of animal behaviour, comparative cognition, social cognition, developmental psychology, philosophy and neuroscience, and aims to encompass both theoretical, methodological and empirical papers. The following themes will be considered, but additional perspectives are welcomed: discussions of theoretical justifications for using visual attention as a proxy for social processing; experimental validation of visual attention, such as examining behavioural, cross-modal or experimental correlates of gaze; testing competing theories of gaze interpretation (such as ‘preference’ versus ‘surprise’); comparing different methods of gaze measurement; consideration of alternatives measures to gaze, in particular in measuring social responses; adoption and integration of new technologies for non-invasive and/or real-world measurement of eye gaze.

Keywords: Visual attention; social cognition; comparative cognition; animal cognition; affective states; methodology

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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