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Abstract:
Joint attention refers to
the ability to coordinate one’s own attention with another on a third
entity (e.g. object or common goal). This uniquely human ability
emerges late in the first year of life and is critical to social-cognitive and
language development; yet the neural bases for this pivotal skill remain
largely understudied. Joint attention includes both Responding to Joint
Attention (RJA), or following another’s bid for shared attention on an
object, and Initiating Joint Attention (IJA), or initiating a bid for shared
attention on an object. To identify the neural bases of both IJA and RJA
we implemented a dual-video set-up in which both subject and experimenter
could monitor each other via video feed in real-time during fMRI
data collection. In each trial, participants either followed the experimenter’s
gaze to a target (RJA) or cued the experimenter to look at the
target (IJA). A control condition, non-joint attention (NJA), was included
in which the subject shifted gaze to a target while the experimenter
closed her eyes. Greater activation was seen in the dorsal medial prefrontal
cortex (dMPFC) and bilateral posterior superior temporal sulcus
(pSTS) during joint attention (IJA + RJA) as compared to NJA. RJA elicited
greater activation in posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) than
NJA while IJA recruited greater activation in dMPFC than NJA. This
novel experimental set-up allowed for the first time identification of the
neural bases of both initiating and responding to joint attention.
