Kirsten Ziman
Princeton Neuroscience Institute
Princeton University
Theory of mind is the ability to intuitively reconstruct the mind states of other people. One of the most important aspects of theory of mind is reconstructing the attention of others. My research tests the hypothesis that we innately model others’ attention (where their attention is now, where it might shift next), facilitating our understanding of their thoughts, actions, and intentions. Using a novel class of stimuli derived from eye tracking data, I found that people accurately distinguish between natural patterns of human attention and artificially manipulated patterns of attention through a combination of visual cues. This supports the hypothesis that people possess a rich predictive model of how others’ attention will move and can tell when that model is violated. Building on this behavioral finding, I further investigated neural correlates, computational implementations, and clinical applications of attention modeling, using the same experiment paradigm. Neurally, fMRI investigation revealed that discrimination between natural and manipulated attention patterns is driven by activity in brain areas classically associated with social cognition and attention. Computationally, neural networks incorporating attention modeling components excelled at recognizing the attention of other networks and working collaboratively to accomplish tasks. Clinically, individuals with atypical social processing (participants with Autism) exhibited subtle performance differences in attention discrimination. These findings underscore that attention modelling is an inherently socially oriented task: it involves social cognition mechanisms in the brain, it increases socially oriented behavior in computational systems, and, when social processing differs in humans (e.g. those with Autism), attention modeling also differs. These findings lay the groundwork for naturalistic, multi-disciplinary research at the intersection of attention and social cognition.
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