Complex modulation of visual attention to 3rd-person interactions in wild macaques

Social animals rely on socio-cognitive skills to monitor their social environment and make informed decisions. Yet, visual attention to others' interactions in real-life scenes remains understudied, despite evidence for dedicated neuronal networks for the processing of real-life social information and for social interactions in particular. Here, we ask how subject characteristics, interaction valence and social relationships between subject and stimuli interact to guide overt attention of 56 wild male Assamese macaques to 962 third-person social scenes that unfolded spontaneously in their vicinity. Social interactions drew more and longer attention than social control scenes lacking the interaction, highlighting the relevance of interaction. The effect of both social bond strength and dominance relations between subject and stimulus on the probability to attend was independently modulated by scene valence. Moreover, beyond reacting to the affordances of the social scene and independent of their social status, males differed in how long they observed the interactions of others. These findings suggest that visual attention is guided by the value an individual associates with different aspects of the social scene based on previous experience in both the agonistic and the affiliative realms and by current threat indicative of complex information integration in the brain.