Abstract
The chapters in this volume comprise a small sample of a broad multidisciplinary effort to understand how humans navigate their labyrinthine social world. Social attention is fundamental to this endeavor because it determines what information is processed by the individual. In this final chapter we begin by summarizing some of the major findings from this volume, and, in so doing, emphasize how the field has significantly changed during this last century. We then discuss why these findings are still tentative and incomplete as researchers are beginning to confront a number of new challenges and opportunities while studying social attention including: (1) innovative technologies, (2) multimodal data, (3) live versus prerecorded stimuli, and (4) first- versus third-person perspectives. Implicit throughout this volume has been the assumption that social attention is somehow distinct and perhaps specialized, which inevitably leads to controversy, and thus we decided to address this issue directly before concluding. In order to achieve some conceptual coherence, we divide our discussion into three logically separable issues: innateness versus acquisition of expertise, the existence of domain specificity, and brain localization. We conclude with some recommendations on how social attention might be investigated in the future, and argue that social attention should be broadened and studied as a dynamical system—a system that is high-dimensional, multilevel, multicausal, and nonlinear.
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Bertenthal, B., Puce, A. (2015). A Look Toward the Future of Social Attention Research. In: Puce, A., Bertenthal, B. (eds) The Many Faces of Social Attention. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21368-2_8
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