The 'other-bodies' problem in attention

I’m just back from a driving holiday in Namibia. It’s an incredible place for huge, open landscapes and skies that make you feel as if you’re on a different planet – and, as supported by previousresearch, this makes it the perfect place to try to think of new takes on familiar problems...

OK – so ever since William James claimed that ‘‘everybody knows what attention is’’ most researchers have followed him in conceptualising attention as an property of individual minds, studied in isolation. The question of what exactly attention is, and how it “happens” in the brain, is of course a topic of intense, and ongoing discussion (eg, eg). But almost all of the voices in this debate take the same implicit approach of studying the endogenous relationship between the brain activity of a particular individual and that individual’s mental state. What we don’t study is the social context of attention. We know, for example, that when one social partner attends to an object, this increases the spontanous attention that another social partner pays to that object. But how are these types of dynamic, constantly changing social influences substantiated in the brain?

We all know from our undergraduate studies, that Western approaches tend to be more individualist, whereas Eastern approaches emphasise the collective. Whereas Westerners locate the unit of personal identity in the individual, people from Eastern societies are more likely to locate it in the group. So I’d be fascinated to hear some Eastern neuroscientists’ take on this.

In some ways, this speaks to the Neuroconstructivist ideas described in this book, where they talk about affordances - how the brain acquires and develops multiple, fragmentary representations that are just sufficient for on-the-fly processing. It also speaks to ideas from Linda Smith and Esther Thelen in this book, where they argue that instead of conceptualising cognition as internal operations on abstract mental constructs (a ‘black box’ approach), we should instead conceptualise of sensory constructs as generated ‘on the fly’, as minimally sufficient for the action we are planning on something (or someone) else.

But one aspect that these theoretical approaches still find hard to incorporate is the dynamically changing influences of the social partner. Conventionally, we distinguish between ‘top-down’ factors, which are properties of the individual who is attending, and ‘bottom-up’ factors, which are properties of the stimulus being attended to. But this simple, two-way relationship between the person attending and the object being attended to is as far as we go. Although this two-way model describes some of our attention — such as when reading a book alone — in fact, far more of our attention, particularly during early life, occurs in social contexts, such as children paying attention in class or a child learning early language, in a social setting. Here, in addition to properties that we see when we study attention in isolation, there are other, additional fluid properties of the social context in which the individual’s attention is being measured. When one social partner attends to an object, this increases the attention that another social partner plays to that object. But what are the neural mechanisms for that influence?

This type of thing is, of course, ephemeral and hard to study. It’s much easier to study individual brains, one by one, when they are viewing a computer screen in a scanner over a large number of repeated trials. But, as I’ve argued before, it’s vital that we realise just how different the settings in which we habitually study the brain in are to the actual context in which our brains operate, from day to day. Some fantastic recent work is recently starting to address this – but there’s a long road ahead...