Abstract
Direction of eye gaze cues spatial attention, and typically this cueing effect is not modulated by the expression of a face unless top-down processes are explicitly or implicitly involved. To investigate the role of cognitive control on gaze cueing by emotional faces, participants performed a gaze cueing task with happy, angry, or neutral faces under high (i.e., counting backward by 7) or low cognitive load (i.e., counting forward by 2). Results show that high cognitive load enhances gaze cueing effects for angry facial expressions. In addition, cognitive load reduces gaze cueing for neutral faces, whereas happy facial expressions and gaze affected object preferences regardless of load. This evidence clearly indicates a differential role of cognitive control in processing gaze direction and facial expression, suggesting that under typical conditions, when we shift attention based on social cues from another person, cognitive control processes are used to reduce interference from emotional information.
Highlights
The human face is a rich source of information: we are sensitive to where another individual is looking, and by shifting eye gaze to the same location, we have a good idea of their focus of interest [1]
This evidence clearly indicates a differential role of cognitive control in processing gaze direction and facial expression, suggesting that under typical conditions, when we shift attention based on social cues from another person, cognitive control processes are used to reduce interference from emotional information
Empirical findings show that typically, attentional shifts based on gaze direction—as assessed by gaze cueing effects—are not modulated by emotional expressions [45] unless perceptual features such as the greater sclera/pupil contrast [20] or top-down processes e.g., [11, 24,25,26,27] are involved
Summary
The human face is a rich source of information: we are sensitive to where another individual is looking, and by shifting eye gaze to the same location, we have a good idea of their focus of interest [1]. Researchers have investigated whether the information conveyed by eye-gaze and the facial expression of another individual affects where we look using the gaze cueing paradigm [7]. This is a variant of the standard attentional cueing paradigm, in which the central symbolic cue is replaced by a face gazing left or right and participants respond as quickly as possible to a peripheral target appearing shortly after the non-predictive gaze cue. Two questions concerning gaze cueing effects are still open to investigation: 1) whether gaze cueing effects are modulated by faces showing an emotional expression and 2) to what extent gaze cueing effects elicited by unpredictive, central gaze cues shares characteristics of exogenous, reflexive, automatic attention (for a review see Chica et al [8])
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