Abstract
The averted gaze of others triggers reflexive attentional orienting in the corresponding direction. This phenomenon can be modulated by many social factors. Here, we used an eye-tracking technique to investigate the role of ethnic membership in a cross-cultural oculomotor interference study. Chinese and Italian participants were required to perform a saccade whose direction might be either congruent or incongruent with the averted-gaze of task-irrelevant faces belonging to Asian and White individuals. The results showed that, for Chinese participants, White faces elicited a larger oculomotor interference than Asian faces. By contrast, Italian participants exhibited a similar oculomotor interference effect for both Asian and White faces. Hence, Chinese participants found it more difficult to suppress eye-gaze processing of White rather than Asian faces. The findings provide converging evidence that social attention can be modulated by social factors characterizing both the face stimulus and the participants. The data are discussed with reference to possible cross-cultural differences in perceived social status.
Highlights
The averted gaze of others triggers reflexive attentional orienting in the corresponding direction
This is evident in the context of ethnic membership, in which basic intergroup dynamics can interact with other social variables such as perceived social status
We expected Asian participants to exhibit an oculomotor interference in response to both White and Asian faces, even though, based on the results reported by Zhang et al.[22], the effect might turn up to be stronger in the former case, likely as a consequence of differences in the perceived social status associated to the two groups
Summary
The averted gaze of others triggers reflexive attentional orienting in the corresponding direction. The results showed that Black participants exhibited a similar gaze-cueing effect in response to both White and Black faces, whereas White participants displayed no gaze-cueing effect when exposed to Black faces This pattern has been later replicated by Weisbuch et al.[19], who provided direct evidence that this asymmetry was likely to reflect well-known differences in the social status associated with different ethnic groups, as shown in previous studies[20]. In the case of Chinese participants, the results showed an outgroup-like bias, in that a reliable gaze-cueing effect emerged for White faces, whereas the data suggested the presence of an overall null gaze-cueing effect for Asian faces This latter result was unexpected in that, in so far, no study addressing the specific effect of ethnicity on gaze cueing has reported such a pattern for faces belonging to one’s ingroup[8,18,19]
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