Why can a simple glance, a pointing gesture, or even an arrow instantly guide our attention? These cues, known as social referential signals, are among the most fundamental tools of human communication, allowing people to efficiently direct others’ attention toward individuals, objects, or abstract ideas. Understanding how the brain processes such signals is a central question in social neuroscience, with implications for the development of social communication, clinical conditions such as autism, and comparative research across species.

A collaborative research team led by Prof. JIANG Yi from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Prof. ZHU Lusha from Peking University has proposed a novel multi-level neurocognitive framework to explain how the brain processes social referential signals.

The team synthesized findings from multiple research fields and proposed, for the first time, an integrative framework encompassing three levels of processing: innate, learned, and inferential.

The innate level operates from birth, relying on evolutionarily conserved neural pathways that make infants highly sensitive to social cues such as eye contact. The learned level develops through experience, allowing individuals to understand culturally acquired symbols such as arrows or nicknames, through shared neural representations. The inferential level becomes crucial in ambiguous contexts, engaging higher-order brain regions such as the prefrontal cortex to actively infer others’ intentions.

These three levels interact dynamically: innate mechanisms provide the foundation for learning, while learned representations supply prior knowledge that supports flexible inference in novel situations.

“This framework not only explains how the brain processes social referential signals, but also represents an important step toward integrating traditionally separate lines of research in perception and decision-making,” said Dr. YANG Fang from the Institute of Psychology, co-first author of the study.

The study, supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, has been published on Feb. 25 in the Journal of Neuroscience.