Abstract
Gaze following is a fundamental ability that plays an important role in human social function. However, the link between these two processes remains elusive. On the one hand, typically developing persons show robust gaze following in laboratory cuing tasks. On the other hand, investigations with individuals with autism suggest that reduced social competence in this population may partly reflect an atypical access to social information through attending to perceptual changes that normally accompany gaze shifts, like luminance or motion transients. Here we investigated if gaze cuing in typically developing individuals was modulated by similar task-irrelevant perceptual changes. In Experiment 1, a social gaze cue was presented with or without a luminance change. In Experiment 2, a social gaze cue was presented together with a motion cue. Both experiments indicated reduced magnitudes of gaze cuing in persons with low social competence on trials containing an irrelevant perceptual change. This suggests that similarly to individuals with autism, typically developing persons with low social competence also utilize idiosyncratic perceptual changes in the environment to access social content, revealing strong links between basic gaze following abilities and a range of social competence within typical individuals.
Highlights
Spontaneous gaze following is a fundamental socio-cognitive process that facilitates social communication and furnishes typical social competence
This stands in contrast to participants who scored high on social competence measures, whose gaze cuing effects were unaffected by such perceptual fluctuations
In Experiment 2, we assessed whether a similar result is obtained when instead of a luminance change the gaze cue is presented alongside an apparent motion cue
Summary
Spontaneous gaze following is a fundamental socio-cognitive process that facilitates social communication and furnishes typical social competence (i.e., the effectiveness of forming and maintaining social relationships[1]). While the application of controlled experimental procedures like the cuing task has generated a wealth of knowledge about how humans perceive and follow gaze cues[9,10,11,12], the question of how gaze cuing relates to real world social behavior has not yet received much research consideration This is because most investigations conducted to date[6,9,13,14] have examined gaze cuing in typically[9] and atypically developing participants (i.e., individuals with high functioning autism15,16) as a group regardless of the participants’ individual level of social function. Better performance (e.g., target detection, localization, or discrimination) for valid relative to invalid targets is found (see ref. 9 for a review) even when gaze direction does not provide any pertinent information about the target’s location[5,24]
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