title: Selective attention effects on early integration of social signals: same timing, modulated neural sources.
abstract: Humans combine co-emitted social signals to predict other's immediate intentions and prepare an adapted response. However, little is known about whether attending to only one of co-emitted social signals impacts on its combination with other signals. Here, using electroencephalography, we address selective attention effects on early combination of social signals. We manipulated three visual cues: gaze direction, emotional expression, and pointing gesture, while participants performed either emotion or gaze direction judgments. Results showed that a temporal marker of social cues integration emerges 170ms after the stimulus onset, even if the integration of the three visual cues was not required to perform the task, as only one feature at a time was task relevant. Yet in addition to common temporal regions, the relative contribution of specific neural sources of this integration changed as a function of the attended feature: integration during emotion judgments was mainly implemented in classic limbic areas but in the dorsal pathway during gaze direction judgments. Together, these findings demonstrate that co-emitted social cues are integrated as long as they are relevant to the observer, even when they are irrelevant to the ongoing task.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives (LNC), INSERM U960, Département d'Etudes Cognitives (DEC), Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University Paris, France; UPMC Université Paris 06, Paris, France. Electronic address: marwa.el.zein@ens.fr.
authors.forename: Marwa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: El Zein
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives (LNC), INSERM U960, Département d'Etudes Cognitives (DEC), Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University Paris, France; UFR de psychologie, Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis 93526 cedex, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Lucile
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Gamond
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives (LNC), INSERM U960, Département d'Etudes Cognitives (DEC), Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University Paris, France; Laboratoire de Psychopathologie and Neuropsychologie (LPN, EA2027), Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France.
authors.forename: Laurence
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Conty
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives (LNC), INSERM U960, Département d'Etudes Cognitives (DEC), Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University Paris, France; Centre de NeuroImagerie de Recherche, CRICM, Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6 UMR-S975, Inserm U975, CNRS UMR7225, Groupe Hospitalier Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France. Electronic address: julie.grezes@ens.fr.
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Grèzes
mesh_terms: D000222:Adaptation, Physiological / Q000502:physiology; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012919:Social Behavior; D012938:Social Perception; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Attentional influence; EEG; Integration; Self-relevance; Social cues