Research Report Cognitive Ethology and exploring attention in real-world scenes Daniel Smilek a, ⁎ ,1 , Elina Birmingham b,1 , David Cameron b , Walter Bischof c , Alan Kingstone b a Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1 b University of British Columbia, Canada c University of Alberta, Canada ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Accepted 14 December 2005 Available online 9 February 2006 We sought to understand what types of information people use when they infer the attentional states of others. In our study, two groups of participants viewed pictures of social interactions. One group was asked to report where the people in the pictures were directing their attention and how they (the group) knew it. The other group was simply asked to describe the pictures. We recorded participants' eye movements as they completed the different tasks and documented their subjective inferences and descriptions. The findings suggest that important cues for inferring attention of others include direction of eye gaze, head position, body orientation, and situational context. The study illustrates how attention research can benefit from (a) using more complex real-world tasks and stimuli, (b) measuring participants' subjective reports about their experiences and beliefs, and (c) observing and describing situational behavior rather than seeking to uncover some putative basic mechanism(s) of attention. Finally, we discuss how our research points to a new approach for studying human attention. This new approach, which we call Cognitive Ethology, focuses on understanding how attention operates in everyday situations and what people know and believe about attention. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Attention Cognitive ethology Eye monitoring Inferring attention Subjective report Meaning 1. Introduction “I learned that when a science does not usefully apply to practical problems there is something wrong with the theory of science.” J. J. Gibson, 1982, p. 18 (original published 1967) Attention has always been a topic of interest in cognitive neuroscience (Gazzaniga, 1995). Attention continues to be an interesting topic because it is something that we all experi- ence, whether we are driving a car, listening to a conversation in a noisy room, or reading the morning paper. Everyone is, in some sense, an expert on what attention is and how it is used in everyday settings. Indeed, it is a truism to say that “everyone knows what attention is” (James, 1983/1890). Interestingly, however, studies of attention from the perspec- tives of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience have neglected to articulate the knowledge that ordinary people have about attention and to study how attention operates in everyday situations (see Kingstone et al., 2003; Koch, 1999; BRAIN RESEARCH 1080 (2006) 101 – 119 ⁎ Corresponding author. Fax: +1 519 746 8631. E-mail address: dsmilek@watarts.uwaterloo.ca (D. Smilek). 1 Both DS and EB contributed equally to the paper. 0006-8993/$ – see front matter © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2005.12.090 available at www.sciencedirect.com www.elsevier.com/locate/brainres