Is eye contact the key to the social brain?
Lead Research Organisation:
Birkbeck, University of London
Department Name: Psychological Sciences
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Atsushi Senju (Principal Investigator / Fellow) |
Publications
Akechi H
(2011)
Do children with ASD use referential gaze to learn the name of an object? An eye-tracking study
in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders
Akechi H
(2010)
The effect of gaze direction on the processing of facial expressions in children with autism spectrum disorder: an ERP study.
in Neuropsychologia
Akechi H
(2009)
Does gaze direction modulate facial expression processing in children with autism spectrum disorder?
in Child development
Deligianni F
(2011)
Automated gaze-contingent objects elicit orientation following in 8-month-old infants.
in Developmental psychology
Farroni T
(2010)
The Science of Social Vision
Farroni T
(2010)
The Science of Social Vision
Kikuchi Y
(2011)
Atypical disengagement from faces and its modulation by the control of eye fixation in children with autism spectrum disorder.
in Journal of autism and developmental disorders
Kikuchi Y
(2009)
Faces do not capture special attention in children with autism spectrum disorder: a change blindness study.
in Child development
Senju A
(2011)
Atypical modulation of face-elicited saccades in autism spectrum disorder in a double-step saccade paradigm.
in Research in autism spectrum disorders
Senju A
(2010)
Developmental and comparative perspectives of contagious yawning.
in Frontiers of neurology and neuroscience
| Description | I developed the 'top-down modulator model' (e.g. Senju & Johnson, 2009a, 2009b), which hypothesizes that eye contact is initially detected through a subcortical route, which then interacts with other contextual information to modulate the cortical processing of social information. It is also hypothesized that infants are born with widespread connections between subcortical and cortical structures, and postnatal experience biased by subcortical route will interact with these connections to form specialized cortical networks to process social information. The model also hypothesizes that autism spectrum disorder, which involves atypical eye contact behaviour, might results from atypical communication between subcortical route and cortical structures. Research findings about the mechanisms underlying the eye contact effect demonstrated that the eye contact effect occurs without conscious awareness about the gaze (Stein et al., 2011), suggesting the role of unconscious processing. Another study demonstrated that the eye contact effect involves subcortical processing in typically developing children and children with autism, but the latter also show atypical interaction between cortical and subcortical route (Senju et al., 2011). Yet another study showed that the attention to the face depends on the eye contact in both typically developing children and children with autism, but only typically developing children shows additional cortical activation relevant to the attentional engagement to the face when they are making eye contact (Kikuchi et al., 2011). We have also explored the eye contact effect in patients with unilateral pulvinar lesion, and found that the atypical attention to the face with eye contact is not related to the impairment in pulvinar per se, but the preserved (or damaged) connectivity between pulvinar, superior colliculus and amygdala. As the fast-track modulator model hypothesizes that these connectivity forms the subcortical route, it supports the model. I plan to follow up on these patients with pulvinar lesions, to examine the nature and extent of damaged eye contact effect, and its relevance to the connectivity in the subcortical route. Research findings about the development of the eye contact effect demonstrated that sighted infants of blind parents, who experience limited experience of eye contact with their primary caregivers, do not show the overall impairment in social behaviour in general or more specific skill-development of social interaction such as gaze following behaviour. However, these infants showed increased attention to adults' eyes when the adult is making a facial gesture in the first year of their life, suggesting that they are compensating for the weaker input of the eye contact by allocating more attention to adults' eyes. Such an increased orienting to the eyes disappeared by the second year of life, suggesting that the compensation is transient in the course of the development and not necessarily present in later life. Another line of research have demonstrated that British and Japanese adults, who experience different cultural norms on the use of eye contact, shows different patterns of eye gaze to others' eyes. Future study will investigate how such difference between cultures emerges during the course of development. |
| Exploitation Route | The theory of the eye contact effect, which has been published in two major review papers, is making significant impact in wide area of basic and applied science. There review article have been cited more than 300 times together, and has lead to several major findings by other scientists. Firstly, several studies have been put forward to demonstrate the involvement of subcortical pathway on eye contact processing. Secondly, a series of studies by us and other research group have highlighted the effect of early social experience on the cognitive and neural processing of eye contact. The research has also applied to marketing science, which has suggested that the perceived eye contact from the image on the packaging might have a positive effect on the sales. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Education,Healthcare,Retail |
| Description | Some of the papers have been featured in the national and international media, such as The Times, Reuters Health and Scientific American. Our research outcome has also been disseminated to broader society through Insight Magazine and Insight Radio, which are run by the Royal National Institute of Blind People, and through the annual newsletters of the Babylab, the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London. These means of dissemination are designated for the immediate user group, such as families and professionals involving blind people, and the parents of young infants in general. I was also invited to present at 18 seminars at Universities and Research Institutes in the UK, France and Canada, and at 5 workshops in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and the United States. The output of the fellowship project has also had a wider impact on the scientific community. In the first two years after the end of the grant, the journal articles published as outputs of this fellowship have been cited 348 times in total, with two of the representative publications cited 94 and 85 times each (Google Scholar). The project was mainly aimed at developing the theoretical model discussed above and developing the career of the fellow, and did not aim to achieve economic impact in the short term. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2009 |
| Sector | Education,Healthcare,Retail |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal |
| Description | Cognitive psychological experiment on the effect of cultural norms on the processing of eye contact |
| Amount | £2,500 (GBP) |
| Organisation | The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 04/2009 |
| End | 03/2010 |
| Description | UK-Japan collaboration on developmental cognitive neuroscience |
| Amount | £1,600 (GBP) |
| Organisation | The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 05/2011 |
| End | 05/2012 |
| Description | DIVIDNORM |
| Organisation | École normale supérieure de Lyon (ENS Lyon) |
| Country | France |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | My contribution is to provide expert consultation on social neuroscience, developmental psychology and cross-cultural research. I also contributed to coordinate the experimental design and data collection of cross-cultural research which involves translating the experiments and controlling experimental condition in multiple sites. |
| Collaborator Contribution | All the other partners in École normale supérieure (Paris), University of Neuchatel (Switzerland), Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (Germany) and Kyoto University (Japan) contributed to the experimental design, data collection, analyses and writing up. Collaboration is funded by ESRC Advanced Grant on philosophy, neuroscience, development and cross-cultural study on epistemic norm. |
| Impact | This is a multi-disciplinary project involving Philosophy, Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology, Cultural Anthropology and Cross-cultural psychology. We are still in the process of collecting data, and no output has yet been materialised. |
| Start Year | 2011 |
| Description | The neuropsychological study on patients with pulvinar lesion |
| Organisation | Bangor University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The collaboration started as a pilot study to apply for MRC Career Development Award. My contribution was for experimental design and theoretical work. It now forms part of MRC Career Development Award, for which I lead the project. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Professor Rafal provided access to rare focal brain lesion patient, access to the lab in Bangor, and provided expert contribution to the experimental design. He also contributed to the training of my PhD student, Ms Ines Mares, as part of her thesis work involves testing focal brain lesion patients in Bangor. |
| Impact | This collaboration has lead to two successful grant applications; MRC Career Development Award and PhD studentship from Portuguese Government to Ms Ines Mares. |
| Start Year | 2010 |
| Description | Parent Group (Blind Parents Group, 2014) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The Blind Parents Group has allowed parents to share information about our study and discuss its findings further. As a result of this activity 2 more families (with blind parents and sighted babies) joined our study. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Press Coverage (Reuters, 2008) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Media (as a channel to the public) |
| Results and Impact | The activity sparked public interest in the yawning phenomenon and as a result other news websites featured the Reuters article: The Scotsman, Science Now, Los Angeles Times, ABC News. The article appeared on various discussion forums where the general public engaged with the findings. https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080810225117AAYghaU http://www.petgroomerforums.com/chat/showthread.php?17286-Fido-s-not-just-yawning-he-s-empathizing |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2008 |
| URL | http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/08/05/us-dogs-yawning-idUSL557601820080805 |
| Description | Press Coverage (Scientific American, 2009) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The article gave rise to various comments from the general public on the Scientific American website and it lead to other publications feature the study (www.pediastaff.com, ourfamilygenes.ca). After this media coverage the study's author was invited to comment on the findings together with other researchers on the Simons Foundation website (http://sfari.org/news-and-opinion/news/2009/eye-tracking-brings-focus-to-theory-of-mind#ref1). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2009 |
| URL | http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/prompts-help-aspergers/ |
| Description | Press coverage (BBC News, 2008) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The article sparked general interested in the yawing behaviour. As a result, the findings were featured in various radio interviews on BBC Radio 4 , BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Newcastle. Various other British and international journals featured the findings: The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Metro, Los Angeles Times. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2008 |
| URL | http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7541633.stm |