Does self-construal shape automatic social attention?

Ronda F Lo,Andy H Ng,Adam S Cohen,Joni Y Sasaki

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0246577

Abstract

We examined whether activating independent or interdependent self-construal modulates attention shifting in response to group gaze cues. European Canadians (Study 1) and East Asian Canadians (Study 2) primed with independence vs. interdependence completed a multi-gaze cueing task with a central face gazing left or right, flanked by multiple background faces that either matched or mismatched the direction of the foreground gaze. Results showed that European Canadians (Study 1) mostly ignored background gaze cues and were uninfluenced by the self-construal primes. However, East Asian Canadians (Study 2), who have cultural backgrounds relevant to both independence and interdependence, showed different attention patterns by prime: those primed with interdependence were more distracted by mismatched (vs. matched) background gaze cues, whereas there was no change for those primed with independence. These findings suggest activating an interdependent self-construal modulates social attention mechanisms to attend broadly, but only for those who may find these representations meaningful.

Highlights

Humans infer what others want or feel by following their gaze [1, 2]
Central to literature on social attention is the gaze cueing paradigm: a directional gaze can facilitate reaction times to perceiving targets that eventually appear in the same versus opposite direction [1, 6]
There was no main effect of Prime, F(1, 99) = 0.52, p = .472, ηp2 = .005, and there were no two- or three-way interactions of Prime with Condition and Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA), ps > .55, ηp2s < .004, suggesting the primes did not shift the social attention system into narrower or wider modes of attention (Fig 2)

Summary

Introduction

Humans infer what others want or feel by following their gaze [1, 2] This ability—called social attention—is automatic [1], early developing [3], and often assumed to be resistant to external influence. Central to literature on social attention is the gaze cueing paradigm: a directional gaze can facilitate reaction times to perceiving targets that eventually appear in the same (congruent) versus opposite (incongruent) direction [1, 6] This “cueing effect” occurs despite cues being uninformative about where the target appears (i.e., when only 50% of cues are valid) and even when participants are explicitly informed that cues are nonpredictive [1], suggesting that gaze

Objectives

Methods

Results