Many Faces of Social Attention

Aina Puce is a social/cognitive neuroscientist with a long-standing interest in the neural bases of human face perception and more recently, non-verbal communication. Puce was one of the first researchers to study neurophysiological responses to dynamic human faces in the mature human brain. Her studies have used behavior paired with invasive and non-invasive EEG, MEG, and fMRI to explore how the brain perceives and processes dynamic human faces under different social contexts. Bennett I. Bertenthal is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist with 35 years of experience studying the perception and production of human actions in infants and adults. He was a pioneer in the study of the development of infants’ perception and discrimination of biological motions, and more recently has focused on how infants’ and adults’ social attention to face orientation, eye gaze, pointing, and manual actions contributes to their understanding the social goals of others. His research combines eye tracking, EEG, response times, and motion analysis to study action understanding in real and developmental time.

“The Many Faces of Social Attention: Behavioral and Neural Measures … provides a compilation of their theoretical formulations and empirical findings. … the reader who will invest the energy required to digest this book will be rewarded with new perspectives that will prove very valuable in determining ‘how we do business’ as researchers and practitioners.” (James P. Schmidt, PsycCRITIQUES, Vol. 61 (22), May, 2016)

• Acknowledgements.- Chapter 1. New frontiers of investigation in social attention.- Chapter 2. The development of social attention in human infants.- Chapter 3. The development of brain mechanisms for social attention in humans.- Chapter 4. Neural bases for social attention in healthy humans.- Chapter 5. Social Attention, Social Presence, and the Dual Function of Gaze.- Chapter 6. Early departures from normative processes of social engagement in infants with ASD.- Chapter 7. Aberrant social attention and its underlying neural correlates in adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder.- Chapter 8. A look toward the future of social attention research.