Mechanisms for individual, group-based and crowd-based attention to social information

Two or more interacting individuals make up a social group. In this Review, we show that human attention plays a key part in the selection, management and maintenance of social interactions between individual members of social groups of any size. Three attentional mechanisms are presented here. The individual cue-selection mechanism facilitates the selection of social cues, such as gaze, facial or head information, from individual group members. The group-based selection mechanism enables selection based on the perceived quality of social cues derived from individual group members or the emerging interactions between individual group members. Finally, the crowd-based selection mechanism enables selection based on an overall representation of the social information derived from assessing the majority of consistent cues in the crowd. The three attentional mechanisms are used flexibly, interchangeably and dynamically as a function of group size and the ability to individuate group members.