PESIMENA, Gabriele and WILSON, Christopher and BERTAMINI, Marco and SORANZO, Alessandro (2019). The role of perspective taking on attention: a review of the special issue on the Reflexive Attentional Shift Phenomenon. Vision, 3 (4).
Documents
25218:537448
PDF
vision-03-00052.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
vision-03-00052.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (2MB) | Preview
Abstract
Attention is a process that alters how cognitive resources are allocated, and it allows
individuals to efficiently process information at the attended location. The presence of visual or
auditory cues in the environment can direct the focus of attention towards certain stimuli; even if
the cued stimuli are not the individual’s primary target. Samson et al. [1] demonstrated that seeing
another person in the scene (i.e. a person-like cue) caused a delay in responding to target stimuli
not visible to that person: “altercentric intrusion”. This phenomenon, they argue, is dependent
upon the fact that the cue used resembled a person as opposed to a more generic directional
indicator. The characteristics of the cue are the core of the debate of this special issue. Some
maintain that the perceptual-directional characteristics of the cue are sufficient to generate the bias
whilst others argue that the cuing is stronger when the cue has social characteristics (relates to what
another individual can perceive). The research contained in this issue confirms that human
attention is biased by the presence of a directional cue. We discuss and compare the different
studies. The pattern that emerges seems to suggest that social relevance of the cue is necessary in
some contexts but not in others, depending on the cognitive demand of the experimental task. One
possibility is that the social mechanisms are involved in perspective taking when the task is
cognitively demanding, whilst they may not play a role in automatic attention allocation.
More Information
Statistics
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year
Metrics
Altmetric Badge
Dimensions Badge
Share
Actions (login required)
![]() |
View Item |