Nalbandian, Lena Verjen; (2025) How I Search with You: Exploring the Influence of Socially Valued Targets and Features in Joint Visual Search. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Social contexts are pertinent in our dynamic social world where efficient social interactions are necessitated for the best possible outcomes. Research has long focused on understanding visual attention at the individual level, but the same attention has not been given to experiments utilizing a joint action setup where participants work alongside a partner. Across four experiments, this dissertation aims to investigate how a social context, defined by the presence of an interaction partner in the task space, in addition to the distractors assigned to them which are imbued with social relevance due to their ownership, modulates attentional efficiency in joint visual attention tasks. Thus, the current study assessed whether visual search for low-level features is modulated by top-down social contextual information. By bridging the mechanisms of co-representation and social offloading, found to emerge differentially across joint tasks, with factors that differentially affect attentional processing, I aimed to provide a framework for understanding how social relevance shapes attention within a social context. Thus, two paradigms were utilized, a joint cueing task (Chapter 3) which investigated how social ownership of a cue influenced attentional guidance, and a joint conjunction search task (Chapters 4-6) which manipulated partner presence through a feature-based context utilizing various stimuli. While results in the joint cueing studies found evidence for de-prioritization of a partner’s target stimuli held in working memory, the joint conjunction search studies provided less consistent evidence for social modulation highlighting the potential boundary conditions for these effects. Given these patterns of results, this work advances our understanding of how attentional mechanisms can be shaped or constrained by social variables, and provides a framework that may inform future studies utilizing a joint conjunction search paradigm.

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