The functions of the "Greeting Ceremony" among male mantled howlers (Alouatta palliata) on Agaltepec Island, Mexico

Nonhuman primates use greeting behaviors as nonaggressive communicatory signals in multiple social contexts. Adult male mantled howlers (Alouatta palliata) perform a ritual greeting that has been associated with bond-strengthening functions. The aim of this study is to explore the greeting patterns of male howlers living on Agaltepec Island, Mexico. Specifically, we analyzed the relationships between greetings and several individual, relational, and contextual variables, such as the expression of affiliation and agonism, dominance rank, age, kinship relationships, spatial organization, activity patterns, and subgrouping patterns. Greetings were more frequent between males with closer dominance ranks. Among those dyads that greeted at least once, dominant males initiated greetings more frequently than less-dominant males. On the other hand, more greetings were observed when one of the participants had recently returned to a subgroup and during locomotion. On the basis of these results, we propose that on Agaltepec greetings are a conflict management mechanism used between males of similar ranks. The fission-fusion social system of this group of howlers allows males with conflicting interests to remain separated, and greetings may reduce tension during fusion events.     

What We Observe Is Biased by What Other People Tell Us: Beliefs about the Reliability of Gaze Behavior Modulate Attentional Orienting to Gaze Cues

For effective social interactions with other people, information about the physical environment must be integrated with information about the interaction partner. In order to achieve this, processing of social information is guided by two components: a bottom-up mechanism reflexively triggered by stimulus-related information in the social scene and a top-down mechanism activated by task-related context information. In the present study, we investigated whether these components interact during attentional orienting to gaze direction. In particular, we examined whether the spatial specificity of gaze cueing is modulated by expectations about the reliability of gaze behavior. Expectations were either induced by instruction or could be derived from experience with displayed gaze behavior. Spatially specific cueing effects were observed with highly predictive gaze cues, but also when participants merely believed that actually non-predictive cues were highly predictive. Conversely, cueing effects for the whole gazed-at hemifield were observed with non-predictive gaze cues, and spatially specific cueing effects were attenuated when actually predictive gaze cues were believed to be non-predictive. This pattern indicates that (i) information about cue predictivity gained from sampling gaze behavior across social episodes can be incorporated in the attentional orienting to social cues, and that (ii) beliefs about gaze behavior modulate attentional orienting to gaze direction even when they contradict information available from social episodes.     

Ontogenie und Funktion der Rangordnung innerhalb einer Geschwisterschar von Graugänsen (Anser anser L.)

Between the siblings of a family of greylag geese (Anser anser L.) a rank order is established by fighting during the first days after hatching, and also by other, more complex interactions. The position of each goose in the rank order can be defined by three groups of behaviour patterns (aggressive behaviour, “greetings”, escape responses). A clear-cut ranking relation between two individuals is a prerequisite for their close cohesion. The survival function of rank order lies in diminishing the intensity and frequency of agonistic interactions, in diminishing social stress situations and in guaranteeing the close family cohesion.     

The social behaviour of the hoary marmot (Marmota caligata)

The social behaviour of four colonies of hoary marmots (Marmota caligata) was studied in Glacier National Park, Montana, during the summer of 1970. Colony structure involved a dominant male with a few females (3 years or older), 2-year-olds, yearlings and pups. Patterns of burrow use, greetings, play, and aggressive chasing are described, indicating a closely-integrated social structure with reproductive patterns suggesting late dispersal and maturation. A close resemblance to the behaviour of the Olympic marmot (M. olympus) is proposed.     

Social relationships and ritualized greetings in adult male baboons (Papio cynocephalus anubis)

Greetings involving exchanges of ritualized sexual gestures are a common form of interaction among adult male baboons, although relatively little attention has been paid to them. In this study, we investigate how greetings reflect important aspects of the male's social relationships, including dominance rank, age/residence status, and cooperative tendencies. The results are based on over 600 greetings among 12 adult males recorded during a 4-month study of a troop of wild olive baboons near Gilgil, Kenya. Four of the adult males were older, lower-ranking, long-term residents, which frequently formed coalitions to take estrous females away from the eight young, higher-ranking males. Virtually all dyads greeted: greetings occurred more than twice as often as other types of male-male interactions; and nearly all greetings occurred in a neutral context, in which there was no resource at stake. The percentage of greetings completed, the frequency with which different gestures were employed, and the roles adopted by each male varied significantly across old-old, old-young, and young-young dyads. Greetings between young adult males were often interrupted or actively resisted, consistent with their unstable and ambiguous dominance relationships. Greetings between old-old dyads were usually completed and appeared consistent with their cooperative relationships. One pair of old males formed a stable, reciprocal coalition against young males, and this pair's greetings showed remarkable symmetry of roles. Greetings, we hypothesize, function to allow males to negotiate important aspects of their relationships, including cooperation.     

Speaking and Listening with the Eyes: Gaze Signaling during Dyadic Interactions

Cognitive scientists have long been interested in the role that eye gaze plays in social interactions. Previous research suggests that gaze acts as a signaling mechanism and can be used to control turn-taking behaviour. However, early research on this topic employed methods of analysis that aggregated gaze information across an entire trial (or trials), which masks any temporal dynamics that may exist in social interactions. More recently, attempts have been made to understand the temporal characteristics of social gaze but little research has been conducted in a natural setting with two interacting participants. The present study combines a temporally sensitive analysis technique with modern eye tracking technology to 1) validate the overall results from earlier aggregated analyses and 2) provide insight into the specific moment-to-moment temporal characteristics of turn-taking behaviour in a natural setting. Dyads played two social guessing games (20 Questions and Heads Up) while their eyes were tracked. Our general results are in line with past aggregated data, and using cross-correlational analysis on the specific gaze and speech signals of both participants we found that 1) speakers end their turn with direct gaze at the listener and 2) the listener in turn begins to speak with averted gaze. Convergent with theoretical models of social interaction, our data suggest that eye gaze can be used to signal both the end and the beginning of a speaking turn during a social interaction. The present study offers insight into the temporal dynamics of live dyadic interactions and also provides a new method of analysis for eye gaze data when temporal relationships are of interest.     

Young infants' neural processing of objects is affected by eye gaze direction and emotional expression

Eye gaze is an important social cue which is used to determine another person's focus of attention and intention to communicate. In combination with a fearful facial expression eye gaze can also signal threat in the environment. The ability to detect and understand others' social signals is essential in order to avoid danger and enable social evaluation. It has been a matter of debate when infants are able to use gaze cues and emotional facial expressions in reference to external objects. Here we demonstrate that by 3 months of age the infant brain differentially responds to objects as a function of how other people are reacting to them. Using event-related electrical brain potentials (ERPs), we show that an indicator of infants' attention is enhanced by an adult's expression of fear toward an unfamiliar object. The infant brain showed an increased Negative central (Nc) component toward objects that had been previously cued by an adult's eye gaze and frightened facial expression. Our results further suggest that infants' sensitivity cannot be due to a general arousal elicited by a frightened face with eye gaze directed at an object. The neural attention system of 3 month old infants is sensitive to an adult's eye gaze direction in combination with a fearful expression. This early capacity may lay the foundation for the development of more sophisticated social skills such as social referencing, language, and theory of mind.     

Beliefs about the Minds of Others Influence How We Process Sensory Information

Attending where others gaze is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of social cognition. The present study is the first to examine the impact of the attribution of mind to others on gaze-guided attentional orienting and its ERP correlates. Using a paradigm in which attention was guided to a location by the gaze of a centrally presented face, we manipulated participants'' beliefs about the gazer: gaze behavior was believed to result either from operations of a mind or from a machine. In Experiment 1, beliefs were manipulated by cue identity (human or robot), while in Experiment 2, cue identity (robot) remained identical across conditions and beliefs were manipulated solely via instruction, which was irrelevant to the task. ERP results and behavior showed that participants'' attention was guided by gaze only when gaze was believed to be controlled by a human. Specifically, the P1 was more enhanced for validly, relative to invalidly, cued targets only when participants believed the gaze behavior was the result of a mind, rather than of a machine. This shows that sensory gain control can be influenced by higher-order (task-irrelevant) beliefs about the observed scene. We propose a new interdisciplinary model of social attention, which integrates ideas from cognitive and social neuroscience, as well as philosophy in order to provide a framework for understanding a crucial aspect of how humans'' beliefs about the observed scene influence sensory processing.     

Social requests and social affordances: how they affect the kinematics of motor sequences during interactions between conspecifics

The present study aimed at determining whether and what factors affect the control of motor sequences related to interactions between conspecifics. Experiment 1 demonstrated that during interactions between conspecifics guided by the social intention of feeding, a social affordance was activated, which modified the kinematics of sequences constituted by reaching-grasping and placing. This was relative to the same sequence directed to an inanimate target. Experiments 2 and 4 suggested that the related-to-feeding social request emitted by the receiver (i.e. the request gesture of mouth opening) is prerequisite in order to activate a social affordance. Specifically, the two experiments showed that the social request to be fed activated a social affordance even when the sequences directed towards a conspecific were not finalized to feed. Experiment 3 showed that moving inside the peripersonal space of a conspecific, who did not produce any social request, marginally affected the sequence. Finally, experiments 5 and 6 indicated that the gaze of a conspecific is necessary to make a social request effective at activating a social affordance. Summing up, the results of the present study suggest that the control of motor sequences can be changed by the interaction between giver and receiver: the interaction is characterized by a social affordance that the giver activates on the basis of social requests produced by the receiver. The gaze of the receiver is a prerequisite to make a social request effective.     

Maintenance of pair bond during the non-reproductive season in a monogamous pipefish <Emphasis Type="Italic">Corythoichthys haematopterus</Emphasis>

During the non-reproductive season, male and female Corythoichthys haematopterus came to a particular site every early morning and performed a series of displays, called greetings, for a few minutes. After exchanging greetings, they had no further interactions during the daytime. This behavioural pattern was basically the same as that observed during the reproductive season. All greeting pairs bred in the following reproductive season if both members were present. These results indicate that mate fidelity of this pipefish is very high and that daily greetings lasting only a few minutes were enough to maintain pair bond all year around.     

Social orienting in gaze leading: a mechanism for shared attention

Here, we report a novel social orienting response that occurs after viewing averted gaze. We show, in three experiments, that when a person looks from one location to an object, attention then shifts towards the face of an individual who has subsequently followed the person''s gaze to that same object. That is, contrary to ‘gaze following’, attention instead orients in the opposite direction to observed gaze and towards the gazing face. The magnitude of attentional orienting towards a face that ‘follows’ the participant''s gaze is also associated with self-reported autism-like traits. We propose that this gaze leading phenomenon implies the existence of a mechanism in the human social cognitive system for detecting when one''s gaze has been followed, in order to establish ‘shared attention’ and maintain the ongoing interaction.     

The Impact of Perceived Social Power and Dangerous Context on Social Attention

Past research has shown that position in a social hierarchy modulates one''s social attention, as in the gaze cueing effect. While studies have manipulated the social status of others with whom the participants interact, we believe that a sense of one''s own social power is also a crucial factor affecting gaze following. In two experiments, we primed the social power of participants, using different approaches, to investigate the participants'' performance in a subsequent gaze cueing task. The results of Experiment 1 showed a stronger gaze cueing effect among participants who were primed with low social power, compared to those primed with high social power. Our predicted gender difference (i.e., women showing a stronger gaze cueing effect than men) was confirmed and this effect was found to be dominated by the lower social power condition. Experiment 2 manipulated the level of danger in the context and replicated the joint impact of gender and one''s perceived social power on gaze cueing effect, especially in the low danger context, in comparison to the high danger context. These findings demonstrate that one''s perceived social power has a concerted effect on social attention evoked by gaze, along with other factors such as gender and characteristics of the environment, and suggest the importance of further research on the complex relationship between an individual''s position in the social hierarchy and social attention.     

Factors influencing mutual gaze in captive female Japanese monkeys (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Macaca fuscata</Emphasis>)

Mutual gaze occurs when two animals simultaneously look at each other, and therefore signals reciprocal visual attention. We studied the occurrence of mutual gaze among adult female Japanese monkeys (Macaca fuscata) housed at the Central Park Zoo in New York City (USA). We found that the frequency of mutual gaze varied according to one aspect of social context (proximity), and that monkeys’ age-rank was negatively correlated with the frequency of mutual gaze. The behavioral contexts in which mutual gaze was observed did not include aggression, and social rank did not predict frequency of mutual gaze. Mutual gaze therefore varies according to some aspects of social context and is generally predicted by factors that influence other social behaviors (e.g., age).     

Primate Rituals: The Function of Greetings between Male Guinea Baboons

The bond‐testing hypothesis suggests that social animals can obtain honest information about the quality of their dyadic relationships by exchanging costly, high‐risk signals (Zahavi & Zahavi 1997). We evaluated this hypothesis by investigating whether adult male baboons use intense greeting interactions to test the quality and strength of their social bonds. Intense greetings involve intimate and risky behaviors such as embracing and the diddling of the penis and/or scrotum. Data were collected on a colony of 40 Guinea baboons (Papio papio) at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. Fifteen adult male baboons were focally observed for 30‐min sessions over a 6‐mo period, resulting in 195 h of observation. We assessed the quality of male–male relationships using measures of affiliation, aggression, and social tolerance. As predicted by the bond‐testing hypothesis, dyads with strong social bonds exchanged a higher frequency of intense greetings than did pairs with poor relationships. We found no support for the competing hypotheses, that suggest that greetings have an aggressive or submissive function or are used as a form of post‐conflict reconciliatory behavior. Neither dominance relationships nor contextual variables were predictive of intense greeting patterns. We suggest that by imposing on his partner, a male baboon is able to obtain reliable information about this individual's current willingness to cooperate and invest in the relationship.     

眼睛注视线索对物体认知加工的影响及其机制

眼睛注视作为一种重要的非语言社会线索，不仅可以传达他人丰富的注意方向信息，并且能够诱发独特的社会性注意行为. 近年来，研究者利用改编的社会性注意任务发现，眼睛注视线索还可以进一步影响我们对各种不同种类物体（用具、符号、面孔等）的感知觉加工，以及主观评价、记忆等其他高级认知加工过程. 眼睛注视线索对物体加工的这种影响受到诸多因素的调节，如面孔属性、数量以及注视模式等. 特别地，眼睛注视线索对物体加工的这一调制作用能够在无意识水平发生，具有一定的特异性. 此外，针对这一调制作用背后机制的研究暗示心理理论和观点采择可能参与其中，但仍有待进一步探究. 眼睛注视对物体加工影响的研究有助于我们深入理解社会互动的方式以及人类与环境的交互过程，因此具有重要的理论意义和社会应用价值.     

Dog's gaze at its owner increases owner's urinary oxytocin during social interaction

Oxytocin (OT) has been shown to play an important role in social bonding in animals. However, it is unclear whether OT is related to inter-species social bonding. In this study, to examine the possibility that urinary OT concentrations of owners were increased by their “dog's gaze”, perhaps representing social attachment to their owners, we measured urinary OT concentrations of owners before and after interaction with their dogs. Dog owners interacted with their dogs as usual for 30 min (interaction experiment) or were instructed not to look at their dogs directly (control experiment). We observed the behaviors of owners and their dogs during the experiments, and measured OT concentrations by radioimmunoassay in urine samples from the owners collected just before and 20 min after interaction with their dogs. Using a cluster analysis, owners could be divided into two groups: one received a longer duration of gaze from their dogs and reported a higher degree of relationship with their dogs (LG); the other received a shorter duration of gaze and reported a lower degree of relationship (SG). Urinary OT was higher in LG than SG after usual interaction with their dogs, but not in the control experiment. In the interaction experiment, a high correlation was found in LG between the frequency of behavioral exchanges initiated by the dog's gaze and the increase in urinary OT. We conclude that interactions with dogs, especially those initiated by the dog's gaze, can increase the urinary OT concentrations of their owners as a manifestation of attachment behavior.     

Cues for early social skills: direct gaze modulates newborns' recognition of talking faces

Previous studies showed that, from birth, speech and eye gaze are two important cues in guiding early face processing and social cognition. These studies tested the role of each cue independently; however, infants normally perceive speech and eye gaze together. Using a familiarization-test procedure, we first familiarized newborn infants (n = 24) with videos of unfamiliar talking faces with either direct gaze or averted gaze. Newborns were then tested with photographs of the previously seen face and of a new one. The newborns looked longer at the face that previously talked to them, but only in the direct gaze condition. These results highlight the importance of both speech and eye gaze as socio-communicative cues by which infants identify others. They suggest that gaze and infant-directed speech, experienced together, are powerful cues for the development of early social skills.     

Responses of collicular fixation neurons to gaze shift perturbations in head-unrestrained monkey reveal gaze feedback control

A prominent hypothesis in motor control is that endpoint errors are minimized because motor commands are updated in real time via internal feedback loops. We investigated in monkey whether orienting saccadic gaze shifts made in the dark with coordinated eye-head movements are controlled by feedback. We recorded from superior colliculus fixation neurons (SCFNs) that fired tonically during fixation and were silent during gaze shifts. When we briefly (相似文献   

Searching for asymmetries in the detection of gaze contact versus averted gaze under different head views: a behavioural study

Eye contact is a crucial social cue constituting a frequent preliminary to interaction. Thus, the perception of others' gaze may be associated with specific processes beginning with asymmetries in the detection of direct versus averted gaze. We tested this hypothesis in two behavioural experiments using realistic eye stimuli in a visual search task. We manipulated the head orientation (frontal or deviated) and the visual field (right or left) in which the target appeared at display onset. We found that direct gaze targets presented among averted gaze distractors were detected faster and better than averted gaze targets among direct gaze distractors, but only when the head was deviated. Moreover, direct gaze targets were detected very quickly and efficiently regardless of head orientation and visual field, whereas the detection of averted gaze was strongly modulated by these factors. These results suggest that gaze contact has precedence over contextual information such as head orientation and visual field.