EXPRESS: The joint attention grouping effect: Perceptual binding of observed social interactions

McDonough, Katrina L., Edwards, S. Gareth, Ewing, Louise and Bayliss, Andrew Paul (2025) EXPRESS: The joint attention grouping effect: Perceptual binding of observed social interactions. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. ISSN 1747-0218

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Abstract

The visual system may perceptually process conspecifics more efficiently when they are interacting, versus not, to support social cognitive functions such as group detection. In three experiments, young adult university students were briefly shown dyads (upright or inverted) and made speeded judgments of whether they attended the same location (joint attention) or different locations (non-joint attention). Participants performed worse with inverted stimuli, but this inversion effect was smaller in joint attention conditions. These findings indicate perceptual grouping of joint attention dyads into a single perceptual unit. This joint attention grouping effect was evident when dyads looked towards spatial locations (Experiment 1), towards objects (Experiment 2), and for asymmetrically composed stimuli (Experiment 3). The effect was weaker for non-social directional stimuli (Experiment 1). These data support the idea that two interacting individuals are coded as one socially bound perceptual unit, supporting efficient and rapid social cognitive computations.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Funding information: This project was funded by a Leverhulme Project Grants RPG-2016-173 and RPG-2023-106 awarded to APB and by a BIAL Foundation grant 147/18 to APB, LE and Lisa J. Stephenson.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	3* ,/dk/atira/pure/researchoutput/REFrank/3_
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Social Cognition Research Group Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Cognition, Action and Perception Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Developmental Science Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Sciences
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	22 Aug 2025 12:30
Last Modified:	16 Nov 2025 07:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/100213
DOI:	10.1177/17470218251396955

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