Editing Attention (section)

===Attention in social contexts===

'''Social attention''' is one special form of attention that involves the allocation of limited processing resources in a social context. Previous studies on social attention often regard how attention is directed toward socially relevant stimuli such as faces and gaze directions of other individuals.<ref>{{cite journal | vauthors = Klein JT, Shepherd SV, Platt ML | title = Social attention and the brain | journal = Current Biology | volume = 19 | issue = 20 | pages = R958–62 | date = November 2009 | pmid = 19889376 | pmc = 3387539 | doi = 10.1016/j.cub.2009.08.010 | bibcode = 2009CBio...19.R958K }}</ref> In contrast to attending-to-others, a different line of researches has shown that self-related information such as own face and name automatically captures attention and is preferentially processed comparing to other-related information.<ref>{{cite journal | vauthors = Humphreys GW, Sui J | title = Attentional control and the self: The Self-Attention Network (SAN) | journal = Cognitive Neuroscience | volume = 7 | issue = 1–4 | pages = 5–17 | date = 2016 | pmid = 25945926 | doi = 10.1080/17588928.2015.1044427 | s2cid = 52867757 }}</ref> These contrasting effects between attending-to-others and attending-to-self prompt a synthetic view in a recent Opinion article<ref name="journal.frontiersin.org">{{cite journal | vauthors = Kuang S | title = Two Polarities of Attention in Social Contexts: From Attending-to-Others to Attending-to-Self | journal = Frontiers in Psychology | volume = 7 | pages = 63 | date = 2016 | pmid = 26869965 | pmc = 4734343 | doi = 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00063 | doi-access = free }}</ref> proposing that social attention operates at two polarizing states: In one extreme, individual tends to attend to the self and prioritize self-related information over others', and, in the other extreme, attention is allocated to other individuals to infer their intentions and desires. Attending-to-self and attending-to-others mark the two ends of an otherwise continuum spectrum of social attention. For a given behavioral context, the mechanisms underlying these two polarities might interact and compete with each other in order to determine a saliency map of social attention that guides our behaviors.<ref name="journal.frontiersin.org"/> An imbalanced competition between these two behavioral and cognitive processes will cause cognitive disorders and neurological symptoms such as [[autism spectrum]] disorders and [[Williams syndrome]].