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

Social animals rely on socio-cognitive skills to monitor their social environment and make informed decisions. Visual attention to others’ interactions 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 3 ^rd 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 relationship strength and dominance rank difference between subject and stimulus on the probability to attend were independently modulated by valence of the scene. Beyond reacting to the affordances of the social scene and independent of their social status, males differed in how long they attended to the interactions of others. 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 in the brain.