Context Modulates Congruency Effects in Selective Attention to Social Cues.

Andrea Ravagli,Barbara F M Marino,Francesco Marini,Paola Ricciardelli

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00940

Abstract

Head and gaze directions are used during social interactions as essential cues to infer where someone attends. When head and gaze are oriented toward opposite directions, we need to extract socially meaningful information despite stimulus conflict. Recently, a cognitive and neural mechanism for filtering-out conflicting stimuli has been identified while performing non-social attention tasks. This mechanism is engaged proactively when conflict is anticipated in a high proportion of trials and reactively when conflict occurs infrequently. Here, we investigated whether a similar mechanism is at play for limiting distraction from conflicting social cues during gaze or head direction discrimination tasks in contexts with different probabilities of conflict. Results showed that, for the gaze direction task only (Experiment 1), inverse efficiency (IE) scores for distractor-absent trials (i.e., faces with averted gaze and centrally oriented head) were larger (indicating worse performance) when these trials were intermixed with congruent/incongruent distractor-present trials (i.e., faces with averted gaze and tilted head in the same/opposite direction) relative to when the same distractor-absent trials were shown in isolation. Moreover, on distractor-present trials, IE scores for congruent (vs. incongruent) head-gaze pairs in blocks with rare conflict were larger than in blocks with frequent conflict, suggesting that adaptation to conflict was more efficient than adaptation to infrequent events. However, when the task required discrimination of head orientation while ignoring gaze direction, performance was not impacted by both block-level and current trial congruency (Experiment 2), unless the cognitive load of the task was increased by adding a concurrent task (Experiment 3). Overall, our study demonstrates that during attention to social cues proactive cognitive control mechanisms are modulated by the expectation of conflicting stimulus information at both the block- and trial-sequence level, and by the type of task and cognitive load. This helps to clarify the inherent differences in the distracting potential of head and gaze cues during speeded social attention tasks.

Highlights

Head and gaze directions are the most important pieces of information used by human perceptual-cognitive systems during social interactions to determine where another person is attending (Argyle and Cook, 1976; Emery, 2000)
reaction time (RT) were filtered to eliminate outliers, defined as those trials on which RT was either below 200 ms or above the mean plus three standard deviations computed in log values (Ratcliff, 1993)
In order to control for the speed-accuracy tradeoff, inverse efficiency (IE) scores were calculated by dividing RTs by the proportion of accuracy (Townsend and Ashby, 1983)

Summary

Introduction

Head and gaze directions are the most important pieces of information used by human perceptual-cognitive systems during social interactions to determine where another person is attending (Argyle and Cook, 1976; Emery, 2000). When one needs to determine where another person is attending based on conflicting directional information delivered by head and gaze, this conflict must be resolved by perceptual-cognitive systems (e.g., Perrett et al, 1992) – the mechanisms underlying head-gaze conflict resolution are not fully understood yet (e.g., Langton, 2000; Moors et al, 2016; Otsuka et al, 2016a,b) It is well-known that head-gaze conflict might lead to biases in the perceived gaze direction during tasks requiring the integration of eye and head orientation (e.g., Gibson and Pick, 1963; Cline, 1967; Anstis et al, 1969; Otsuka et al, 2015, 2016a,b; Moors et al, 2016; Balsdon and Clifford, 2017). Multiple accounts exist regarding the integration of head and eye information during face perception (e.g., Langton, 2000; Ricciardelli and Driver, 2008; Nummenmaa and Calder, 2009; Otsuka et al, 2014)

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Results

Conclusion