Social attention
Social attention—operationalized here as the ability to orienting attention in response to eye gaze- direction—is critical for efficient social interactions, given that social cues, such as another individual’s eye gaze, provide important information regarding an individual’s interests and mental states [25, 26]. Indeed, this behavior is known to be an important precursor of adult cognitive and linguistic competencies [25, 27, 28]. The mechanisms underlying the orienting towards the direction of other’s eye gaze have been generally assessed using a variant of spatial cueing paradigm, in which a drawing/photograph of a face is presented at fixation unpredictably gazing either left or right, and a target is presented afterwards either in the gazed location or in the opposite location. The participant is required to respond to a target that might appear either at the looked-at (valid) or at the opposite location (invalid). Faster reaction times for validly cued targets are thought to indicate an allocation of attention to the looked-at location (i.e. gaze cueing effect). Over the last two decades, reflecting the idea that gaze cueing paradigm tapped into social cognition, several researchers have successfully adapted and applied this paradigm to study social attention in both healthy [29-31] and clinical populations, such as autism [32-34], ADHD [35] and patients with schizophrenia [36, 37]. In euthymic BD patients, most studies reported intact orienting effects in response to no-social spatial cues [38, 39]. However, to our knowledge, no previous experiment has used a gaze cueing paradigm to examine social orienting in Bipolar Disorder.