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The human extended socio-attentional field and its impairment in borderline personality disorder and in social anxiety disorder

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Abstract

Being in the bodily presence of others facilitates important perceptual, social, and informational advantages. For example, it enables direct access to other subjects’ embodied perspectives, motivates intersubjective engagements, and is involved in the construction of shared experiences and joint actions. These advantages are based on and gained through attending to and with others, i.e. they rely on social attention. It is no surprise, therefore, that a growing body of empirical data indicates that social attention is a special attentional state that involves specific behavioral and neural-cognitive properties. Another important feature of the human capacity for social attention, which is highlighted in this article is that in everyday environments social attention considerably extends and enriches the subject’s attentional field. This idea draws on phenomenological considerations and on findings from cognitive science research that suggest that subjects can attend to more than in the center of their attention and that under normal conditions we can gain more features and more situations when attending to the movements, gestures, and facial expressions of others. The influence of others on the structure of our attentional field is evident from situations where others are absent from our daily surroundings. In these circumstances our attentional field narrows and the world transforms into an unfamiliar and sometimes uncanny place. Intriguingly, the same most likely occurs in social pathologies such as BPD (border line personality disorder) and SAD (social anxiety disorder), in which the bodily presence of others does not generate the emotional response we see in healthy humans even though the subject’s basic capacity for social attention is intact.

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Notes

  1. Some studies suggest that this failure overlaps with the subject’s limited attentional capacity. That is, the richness and broadness of the subject’s attentional field evident from subjects’ primary reports is an illusion; in fact, attentional experiences are very limited and amount only to objects (and situations) that are transferred into the subjects’ working memory, and thus can be reported (e.g. Cohen and Dennett 2011).

  2. I suggest that the term ‘awareness’ that is used in this study should be read instead as ‘attentional awareness,’ as it refers to items that were attended by subjects but did not, as yet gain attentional priority over other items.

  3. Additionally, and importantly, the subject’s growing inclination for social referencing encourages the broadening and sophistication of social-attentional traits, such as rapid detection of other humans’ bodies and faces and the sharing of their perspectives and mental states through direct attention.

  4. See the discussion in part 5.

  5. This is evident, for example, in a situation where I suddenly notice people on the other side of the street run away in fear from an event that is, as yet, obscured from me. In these types of circumstances, I normally do not cross the street to examine the situation at hand, rather; their motor behaviors show me that the environment is unsafe (e.g. Gallagher 2012).

  6. When in the bodily presence of others, for example, we will usually pay less attention to daily objects and occurrences, such as the entrance to the buildings we pass on our way to work, nonetheless, they will still appear to us (to a minimal degree).

  7. And most likely also with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

  8. See my discussion at the end of this section.

  9. This extends in ASD to the loss of the crucial advantages that social attention normally facilitates (e.g. Matsushima and Kato 2013).

  10. As in the case of schizophrenia (Fuchs 2010).

  11. In fact, in anxious persons for whom the presence of others is disturbing the embodied company of others probably increases these deficits.

  12. In the study by Fletcher-Watson et al. (2008), the fixation of the person in the scene on an inanimate object influenced the participants’ attention, directing their gaze toward this object.

  13. See my discussion of this study in section 2.1 above.

  14. This idea is inspired by pioneering works by Varela (e.g. 1999) and Gallagher (e.g. 1997) that show the way to bring together phenomenological ideas and cognitive science research. The case of the human extended socio attentional field suggests that investigations that are sensitive to the structure of the subjective world and also take into account the ontogenesis of our intersubjective capacities and the neurocognitive underpinning that allow them could be useful in understanding the attentional properties that facilitate interpersonal engagements and their impairments in mental illnesses.

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Thomas Fuchs, for his help, comments and useful suggestions. I am also deeply thankful to the Minerva foundation for their generous support.

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  1. Post-Doc Fellow of the Minerva Foundation, The University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

    Oren Bader

  2. Psychiatric Department, Heidelberg University Hospital, Voss-Str. 4, 69115, Heidelberg, Germany

    Oren Bader

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Bader, O. The human extended socio-attentional field and its impairment in borderline personality disorder and in social anxiety disorder. Phenom Cogn Sci 19, 169–189 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09621-w

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