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. Visual attention to interactions of others in real-life scenes, however, remains understudied although dedicated neuronal networks have been identified 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 57 wild Assamese macaques to 962 3rd person social scenes that spontaneously unfolded in their vicinity. Social interactions drew more and longer attention than control scenes lacking the interaction, highlighting the relevance of interaction. The effects of both affiliative relationships strength and dominance rank difference between subject and stimulus on the probability to attend were independently modulated by valence of the scene. Independent of their dominance status, males differed in whether and for how long they attended to the conflicts of others indicating that risk avoidance was a strong force guiding attention. Thus, 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 realm and by current threat indicative of complex information integration.