External Seminar: Breaking the Fourth Wall of Cognitive Science: Real-World Social Attention

Abstract:

The “fourth wall” in theater is the illusory barrier that allows the audience to believe that the stage is a world apart from theirs, and actors to overlook the fact that others are observing them. Experiments in social attention, just like in theater, employ a similarly convenient, illusory barrier between participants and the stimuli they are presented with. This talk presents evidence that when the fourth wall of cognitive science is broken - when the stimuli can look back at the participant - common results can be turned on their head, leading to fundamental new insights and directions for research.