CIMeC Research Seminar – Fanny Lachat

^9th January 2013
4pm

• Fanny Lachat, Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives
 Social Group
 Ecole Normale Supérieure 
 Département d'Études Cognitives Paris, France

Title: The multiple facets of joint attention: MEG, behavioral and dual-EEG studies

Abstract: Eyes are one of the most important sources of signal about others. Gaze behavior regulates many different social interactions such as turn taking in a conversation and information seeking. Gaze enables coordinating behaviors and controlling others’ action. Joint attention- the process of dynamic attention alignment between social agents- is a phenomenon that allows understanding other; it is a fulcrum of theory of mind.

In order to study the cerebral correlates of joint attention, we used three different paradigms, each enabling us to answer a particular question always in interest of employing ecological paradigms.
First, a magnetoencephalographic (MEG) study puts into light that gaze direction and facial emotion are integrated very early in the process of attention orienting associated with joint attention, as amended by brain responses to target following fearful gaze cues.
For the next two studies, I built an original set up that allow sitting two persons in a face-to-face situation and recording behavior as well as brain activities under this life- like situation.
The second study consisted in a classical paradigm used to measure joint attention –the gaze cueing paradigm- but in a face- to-face situation. This study demonstrated that the gaze cueing effect can be observed in such situation and it is of the same order of magnitude as that usually reported in the literature on the basis of computerized experiments.
Finally, we used dual-EEG to record simultaneously dyads of participants when they either jointly attended to the same object or attended to different objects. We showed a modulation of the rhythm of attention (alpha) and of the rhythm of social coordination (mu) in the 11-13Hz band under the situation of joint attention compared to the situation of no-joint attention.
These complementary studies allow shedding new lights on the phenomenon of joint attention and its cerebral correlates with the use of original, ecological, experimental designs.

Hosted by Nathan Weisz

Video conference with Mattarello basement