Brain responses to biological relevance

Abstract & This study examines whether orienting attention to biologically based social cues engages neural mechanisms distinct from those engaged by orienting to nonbiologically based nonsocial cues. Participants viewed a perceptually ambiguous stimulus presented centrally while performing a target detection task. By having participants alternate between viewing this stimulus as an eye in profile or an arrowhead, we were able to directly compare the neural mechanisms of attentional orienting to social and nonsocial cues while holding the physical stimulus constant. The functional magnetic resonance imaging results indicated that attentional orienting to both eye gaze and arrow cues engaged extensive dorsal and ventral frontoparietal networks. Eye gaze cues, however, more vigorously engaged two regions in the ventral frontal cortex associated with attentional reorienting to salient or meaningful stimuli, as well as lateral occipital regions. An event-related potential study demonstrated that this enhanced occipital response was attributable to a higher-amplitude sensory gain effect for targets appearing at locations cued by eye gaze than for those cued by an arrowhead. These results endorse the hypothesis that differences in attention to social and nonsocial cues are quantitative rather than qualitative, running counter to current models that assume enhanced processing for social stimuli reflects the involvement of a unique network of brain regions