Many Faces of Social Attention

This book aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the area of social attention. It examines the brain-behavioral bases of social attention from complementary perspectives of different fields, including primate research, clinical and healthy adults findings, developmental studies and the neural bases of social attention. These subjects are each explored in their own specific chapters. Additionally, the volume is book-ended by an introductory chapter that sets the scene for the field as a whole, and a concluding chapter that highlights outstanding questions and potential future directions for research. Social attention is fundamental to the development of effective human non-verbal and verbal communication. We monitor the eyes, faces, hands and postures of others in order to glean what they are attending to, or are interested in, and we notice when they are, or are no longer, looking at us in a conversation. It is something we have in common with non-human primates. Beginning with infants' very early sensitivity to deictic cues, such as eye gaze and pointing, skills such as joint attention and theory of mind start to develop. By examining issues such as human development, and normal and diseased human brain function, as well as non-human primate social attention, The Many Faces of Social Attention is a concise, but complete, reference source for recent literature on social attention. It will be of great interest to researchers in social neuroscience, social psychology, developmental, psychology, social cognition, vision research and clinical psychology.