Abstract
Attending where others gaze is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of social cognition. The present study is the first to examine the impact of the attribution of mind to others on gaze-guided attentional orienting and its ERP correlates. Using a paradigm in which attention was guided to a location by the gaze of a centrally presented face, we manipulated participants' beliefs about the gazer: gaze behavior was believed to result either from operations of a mind or from a machine. In Experiment 1, beliefs were manipulated by cue identity (human or robot), while in Experiment 2, cue identity (robot) remained identical across conditions and beliefs were manipulated solely via instruction, which was irrelevant to the task. ERP results and behavior showed that participants' attention was guided by gaze only when gaze was believed to be controlled by a human. Specifically, the P1 was more enhanced for validly, relative to invalidly, cued targets only when participants believed the gaze behavior was the result of a mind, rather than of a machine. This shows that sensory gain control can be influenced by higher-order (task-irrelevant) beliefs about the observed scene. We propose a new interdisciplinary model of social attention, which integrates ideas from cognitive and social neuroscience, as well as philosophy in order to provide a framework for understanding a crucial aspect of how humans' beliefs about the observed scene influence sensory processing.
Highlights
Being inherently embedded in a social environment, humans have developed means to efficiently read out signals that others convey, to optimize social interactions
A 262 analysis of variance (ANOVA) of the median reaction time (RT) with the factors instruction and cue validity showed that the event-related potential (ERP) effects were paralleled in the behavioral data: instruction type interacted with cue validity, F (1, 24) = 5.47, p = .028, gp2 = .186; with the validity effect being significant in the human-controlled condition, t (24) = 2.071, p = .025, one-tailed (Mvalid = 408 ms, SEM = 9 vs. Minvalid = 411 ms, SEM = 10), but not in the pre-programmed condition, t (24) = .886, p = .192, one-tailed (Mvalid = 410 ms, SEM = 9 vs. Minvalid = 409 ms, SEM = 10)
We examined for modulations of the attention-related sensory gain control mechanism with attention being guided by gaze
Summary
Being inherently embedded in a social environment, humans have developed means to efficiently read out signals that others convey, to optimize social interactions. Humans (and other primates [1,2]) use gaze to communicate intentions, signal behaviorally relevant locations (e.g., of a potential threat), and establish joint attention in social interactions. Since gaze plays such an important social role, the human brain has developed specialized mechanisms enabling detection of gaze direction and attending where others gaze: superior temporal sulcus (STS) encodes gaze direction information (e.g., [3], see [4] for a review), while gaze-induced attentional orienting is realized through interactions of STS with intraparietal sulcus (IPS, [4]). In line with a common pattern of results in a standard Posner-cueing paradigm (e.g., [8,9]), target-related performance is typically better for validly, relative to invalidly, cued locations (cue validity effect)
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