Social attention
Résumé
Social attention refers to the orientation of individuals' activity towards social stimuli, and operates both as a selective perception of those stimuli and as a priming for action. The two main acceptances of the concept are, for individuals A and B: (1) A pays attention to any feature of B, and (2) A specifically attends to B's direction of attention. Nonhuman primates can detect the direction of others' attention based on different cues such as the line of gaze and the orientation of the head and the body. Once detected, the direction of another's attention induces a shift in the individual's own attention; A follows B's line of gaze. Gaze following occurs when A follows B's line of gaze in space, and joint attention when A focuses on the same external object as B. The extent to which social attention is under voluntary control is still under debate.