Follow my lead: behavioural and neural mechanisms of gaze leading in joint attention

Monitoring others’ actions, and our control over those actions, is essential to human social reciprocity. One such everyday social interaction is joint attention when one person follows another’s direction of gaze to a referent object. When initiating joint attention (also known as “gaze leading”), reciprocal gaze responses must be processed rapidly. Therefore, we need to detect and sense agency over these social outcomes. If we cause an outcome, a compression of perception of time occurs between our action and its outcome. This phenomenon is termed temporal binding (also called intentional binding), believed to evidence an implicit sense of agency. Using a temporal binding paradigm, Experiments 1-5 evidence an implicit sense of agency for gaze shift responses to gaze leading. Using an old/new recognition paradigm, Experiments 6-7 evidence equal, high performance for recognition of unfamiliar faces for both previously encountered congruent and incongruent gaze responses to gaze leading. Experiment 8 employed electroencephalography to explore whether the neural system differentiates congruency of gaze shift elicited by gaze leading, finding, for the first time, N170-like evidence of this. Combining previous literature and the new findings in this thesis, a new neuro-cognitive model of joint and shared attention is proposed. This encapsulates the processes at work for both the gaze leader and gaze follower, the associated neural mechanisms and the subsequent social cognition processes which can ensue

Eyes that bind us: Gaze leading induces an implicit sense of agency

Humans feel a sense of agency over the effects their motor system causes. This is the case for manual actions such as pushing buttons, kicking footballs, and all acts that affect the physical environment. We ask whether initiating joint attention – causing another person to follow our eye movement – can elicit an implicit sense of agency over this congruent gaze response. Eye movements themselves cannot directly affect the physical environment, but joint attention is an example of how eye movements can indirectly cause social outcomes. Here we show that leading the gaze of an on-screen face induces an underestimation of the temporal gap between action and consequence (Experiments 1 and 2). This underestimation effect, named ‘temporal binding,’ is thought to be a measure of an implicit sense of agency. Experiment 3 asked whether merely making an eye movement in a non-agentic, non-social context might also affect temporal estimation, and no reliable effects were detected, implying that inconsequential oculomotor acts do not reliably affect temporal estimations under these conditions. Together, these findings suggest that an implicit sense of agency is generated when initiating joint attention interactions. This is important for understanding how humans can efficiently detect and understand the social consequences of their actions

A Critical Examination of Women with Acquired Physical [dis]abilities: Reclaiming a Sense of Community Belonging Through Physically Active Leisure

Using a feminist social constructivist lens, the purpose of this study was to understand the physically active leisure meanings and experiences of women with acquired physical [dis]abilities. Specifically, it aimed to critically examine how women with acquired physical [dis]abilities negotiate, resist and/or become empowered through physically active leisure within the community context. A grounded theory approach was used and a purposive sample of eight women, between the ages of 27-45, participated in this study. Three major themes emerged that best reflect my interpretation of the participants’ experiences: 1) The Essentiality of Physically Active Leisure to Negotiating Her Changing Health Considerations, 2) Confronting the Stigmatizing Gaze as a Woman with an Acquired Physical [dis]ability, and 3) Building Agency and Sense of Connection in the Community. Moreover, the major themes resulted in the culmination of experiences leading to the core theme: Reclaiming a Sense of Community Belonging Through Physically Active Leisure. This study highlights the opportunity for women with acquired physical [dis]abilities to re-engage with physically active leisure and develop a sense of belonging within both [dis]ability specific and mainstream community spaces

The impact of eye contact on the sense of agency

Recent research suggests that eye contact can lead to enhanced self-awareness. A related phenomenon, the sense of agency deals with the notion of the self as the origin of our actions. Possible links between eye contact and agency have been so far neglected. Here, we investigated whether an implicit sense of agency could be modulated by eye gaze. We asked participants to respond (button press) to a face stimulus: looking or not at the participant (experiment 1); or displaying distinct eye gaze before or after a mask (experiment 2). After each trial, participants estimated the time between their key press and the ensuing effects. We found enhanced intentional binding for conditions that involved direct compared to averted gaze. This study supports the idea that eye contact is an important cue that affects complex cognitive processes and suggests that modulating self-processing can impact the sense of agency

Returning the Radiant Gaze: Visual art and embodiment in a world of subjects

Drawing on the latter thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as on the ideas of other contemporary philosophers and theorists, this essay considers the denigration of vision from Plato to twentieth-century anti-ocularism, and argues for the reclamation of vision and visual perception as sensuous, embodied interplay between humans and world, self and other—an opening to wonder and more sensitive human-world relations. It does so through a phenomenological exploration of the process of art-making, and consideration of the role and value of artworks and images in the world. This essay is first and foremost an enquiry. As such it promises no final conclusions but is rather a process, a journey through the contested territory of the sensual world of art and vision

Designing the past: the National Trust as a social-material agency

The National Trust was founded in 1895 for ‘the preservation of places of historic interest or natural beauty’. While the distinction between the cultural and the natural seemed obvious at that time and members and visitors were not even implicated actors, we argue that the National Trust may be better understood as a co-constructed network effect of the social and material, which in turn affords social-material agency. There are currently 3.5 million members of the National Trust and 50 million visitors every year to National Trust properties, which include the largest collection of gardens in the world and over 300 historic houses and open-air properties. While the notion of design itself may seem to be an exemplar of the humanist love of agency, we argue (following Latour) that traditional notions of agency, which were asymmetrically distributed to the human actors, take insufficient cognisance of evident occasions of ‘material agency’ (Pickering, 1995) and the site of conservation is one site whereby the agency produced by social-material assemblages seems interesting and revealing. Whereas the social-material practices of design may seem in some tension with those of conservation, we argue in this paper that a close analysis of a particular site of conservation shows a manifold of ‘designing’ actors. Whatever the National Trust conserves could be considered as an example of particular and situated designs condensed from the interactions of humankind and nature. Similarly the visitor experience is also designed. While conservation can imply a certain social-material agency, it is much less well understood how conservation co-produces agency, and how these network effects serve the purposes of conservation by the Trust, visitors and other actors through the agency of the social and material. This paper will reveal some of the social-material practices which afford a visit to a property and what such visits afford the social-material practices of the National Trust

Festival Space: gender, liminality and the carnivalesque

Purpose - Contemporary outdoor rock and popular music festivals offer liminal spaces in which event participants can experience characteristics associated with the carnivalesque. Festival goers celebrate with abandonment, excess and enjoy a break from the mundane routine of everyday life. The aim of this conceptual paper is to explore the way gender is negotiated in the festival space. Design/methodology/approach - The rock and popular music tribute festival, known as ‘Glastonbudget’ provides the focus for this conceptual paper. A pilot ethnographic study at the event utilising photographic imagery was used to understand the way in which gender is displayed. Findings - It is suggested that liminal zones offer space to invert social norms and behave with abandonment and freedom away from the constraints of the everyday but neither women nor men actually take up this opportunity. The carnivalesque during Glastonbudget represents a festival space which consolidates normative notions of gender hierarchy via a complicated process of othering. Research limitations/implications - This is a conceptual paper which presents the need to develop social science based studies connecting gender to the social construction of event space. The ideas developed in this article need to be further explored further building upon the research design established here. Originality/value – There is currently a paucity of literature surrounding the concept of gender within these festival spaces especially in relation to liminality within events research

ORLAN Revisited: Disembodied Virtual Hybrid Beauty

I argued in 2000 that the French artist ORLAN may have moved away from her Reincarnation performances toward her Self-Hybridizations because she thought that in the latter she would be more transparently obvious in meaning and less frequently misunderstood. I may have overstated the ability of audiences to comprehend, however. In this essay I argue that the virtual beauty that ORLAN unfolds in her ongoing series Self-Hybridizations is not a real or actual beauty but rather a fake beauty, causally disembodied, based on the effects she intends to create from an imaginative use of combined hybrid imagery. Subverting the familiar philosophical notions of aesthetic distance and aesthetic appreciation, hers is not a monstrous beauty (as some feminist art theorists contend) but rather a fake beauty that still has aesthetic features worth assessing. I suggest the possibility of generational differences in understandings of the term 'feminist', i.e., shifts in meaning from early feminist theory of the 1970s to ever-evolving, twenty-first century notions of the term, all of which add to the confusion. As I negotiate this terrain, I hope to steer both critics and viewers more directly to the words of the artist herself, "I have tried to make my Self-Hybridations as 'human' as possible, like mutant beings, but I still did not think that the confusion could be possible.

A balancing act: Agency and constraints in university students’ understanding of and responses to sexual violence in the night-time economy

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Open Access articleThis paper extends our understanding of how university students make sense of, and respond to, sexual violence in the night-time economy (NTE). Based on semi-structured interviews with 26 students in a city in England, we examine students’ constructions of their experiences of sexual violence within the NTE, exploring their negotiations with, and resistance to, this violence. Building upon theories of postfeminism, we interrogate the possibilities for resistance within the gendered spaces of the NTE and propose a disaggregated conceptualisation of agency to understand responses to sexual violence, thereby offering useful insights for challenging sexual violence in the NTE and in universities