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.