In 2010, medical researchers uncovered a wiring diagram that shows how the brain pays attention to visual, cognitive, sensory and motor cues. The study was the first of its kind to show how the brain switches attention from one feature to the next.
Since then, researchers have continued to learn how our three-pound brains do such amazing and varied things. For example, because information about gender, family and social status are essential for reproduction and survival, it seems likely that specialized neural mechanisms have evolved to process social information.
Results from previous studies and some functional imaging studies in human subjects have begun to define the circuitry of a "social brain."
Social stimuli grab our attention. Our brains automatically pay attention to everyday actions linked to a social context. However, it has rarely been investigated how variations in attention affect the processing of social stimuli. The answer could help us uncover details of social cognition processes such as action understanding.
New research published in this month's Consciousness and Cognition journal indicates our perception is highly sensitized for absorbing social information. The brain is thus trained to pay a great degree of attention to everyday actions. This fact has been verified by neuroscientist Dr. Martin Brune and philosopher Dr. Albert Newen, both from Ruhr-Universitat Bochum (RUB), together with Eleonore Neufeld and other colleagues from Bochum.
For the purpose of the study, the researchers analyzed bottom-up attention separately from targeted top-down attention. In order to separate both attention processes, the team used hypnosis. Thus, they switched off the top-down processes in their test participants.
Hypnotized, the study participants viewed video clips where people put coins into different-colored bowls. The researchers had expected that processing of social information — in this case everyday activities of other people — would be prioritized under hypnosis because the brain processes them automatically in the bottom-up attention process.
Using electroencephalography (EEG), the research team recorded the signal that indicates in what way intentional actions are processed. They compared that specific signal, i.e., mu-suppression, in the hypnotized and nonhypnotized state. The result: mu-suppression was, as expected, stronger if the participants were hypnotized.
If top-down attention processes are switched off through hypnosis, the brain prioritizes the processing of social information. This suggests everyday actions are generally given particular attention. According to Dr. Newen, the research results support the view of humans as beings whose social competence sets them apart from animals.
The findings of this study support the Social Relevance Hypothesis that social action processing is a bottom-up driven attentional process and can therefore be altered as a function of bottom-up processing devoted to a social stimulus. Moreover, the project demonstrates to what extent hypnosis is a viable option for analyzing cognitive processes.
