Social attention is foundational for supporting positive social relationships during adolescence, a developmental period in which social interactions with peers becomes increasingly salient and rewarding 1. Both endogenous (i.e., automatic and undirected, as in detection and encoding) and exogenous (i.e., purposeful and directed, as in reasoning and prediction) social attentional skills are required to decode and understand the actions and intentions of other people, However, at conceptual and practical levels, it is unclear if subdomains of endogenous attention, such as visual discrimination, motivation, and coordinated behavior, are distinct features of social attention 2,3. Additionally, the extent of influence by individual differences in more complex sociocognitive abilities and/or biological factors needs to be further explored. Moreover, further delineation of endogenous and exogenous social cognition at brain and behavioral levels will aid in the development of clinical interventions for individuals with known social attention or sociocognitive problems (e.g., children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder, ASD). The overall objective of the project is to characterize candidate subdomains of social attention that may relate to sociocognitive skills in adolescence. Proposed project scientific goals: (1) To establish whether social attention involves separable endogenous and exogenous subdomains of visual discrimination, coordinated behaviors, motivation using latent structure analysis; (2) To characterize potential subgroups related to individual differences in sociocognitive abilities and biological predictors using latent profile analysis. These goals will be addressed using a battery of tasks targeting different aspects of social attention via classic behavior, electrophysiology (ERP), and eye tracking (ET). A large and diverse sample of 160 healthy adolescents (11-13 years old) will be enrolled and stratified based upon sociocognitive skills (parent-reported during screening and confirmed via in- person assessment). In this way, we anticipate capturing variability in sociocognitive abilities, increasing the likelihood that the conclusions of analyses may be applicable to a wide range of individuals, including adolescents with neurodevelopmental disorders. Additionally, the narrow age range provides the opportunity to disentangle chronological age, sex, and pubertal status as potential biological factors of social attention. These contributions are expected to deepen our conceptualization of social attention by generating a comprehensive characterization of social attention mechanisms during adolescence across multiple units of measurement. Importantly, we will examine both endogenous and exogenous social attention by implementing a creative battery of tasks that will track spontaneous biological and behavioral mechanisms of social attention. This will become increasingly important in preparation for clinical trials involving minimally verbal or nonverbal adolescents (e.g., 50% of the ASD population is nonverbal) that may struggle with tasks that require an explicit behavioral response.
As an instrumental skill for maintaining positive social relationships, social attention is critical for understanding and learning about people, yet it is unclear whether there are distinct subdomains of endogenous (automatic) and exogenous (directed) social attention. This project aims to characterize these aspects of social attention across brain and behavior measurements in a large and diverse sample of adolescents. This information will improve our conceptualization of social attention, as well as mapping social attention abilities to individual differences in real-world sociocognitive abilities and biological factors.
