Abstract
Understanding and reacting to others’ nonverbal social signals, such as changes in gaze direction (i.e., gaze cue), are essential for social interactions, as it is important for processes such as joint attention and mentalizing. Although attentional orienting in response to gaze cues has a strong reflexive component, accumulating evidence shows that it can be top-down controlled by context information regarding the signals’ social relevance. For example, when a gazer is believed to be an entity “with a mind” (i.e., mind perception), people exert more top-down control on attention orienting. Although increasing an agent’s physical human-likeness can enhance mind perception, it could have negative consequences on top-down control of social attention when a gazer’s physical appearance is categorically ambiguous (i.e., difficult to categorize as human or nonhuman), as resolving this ambiguity would require using cognitive resources that otherwise could be used to top-down control attention orienting. To examine this question, we used mouse-tracking to explore if categorically ambiguous agents are associated with increased processing costs (Experiment 1), whether categorically ambiguous stimuli negatively impact top-down control of social attention (Experiment 2), and if resolving the conflict related to the agent’s categorical ambiguity (using exposure) would restore top-down control to orient attention (Experiment 3). The findings suggest that categorically ambiguous stimuli are associated with cognitive conflict, which negatively impact the ability to exert top-down control on attentional orienting in a counterpredicitive gaze-cueing paradigm; this negative impact, however, is attenuated when being pre-exposed to the stimuli prior to the gaze-cueing task. Taken together, these findings suggest that manipulating physical human-likeness is a powerful way to affect mind perception in human-robot interaction (HRI) but has a diminishing returns effect on social attention when it is categorically ambiguous due to drainage of cognitive resources and impairment of top-down control.
Highlights
In social interactions, we use information from social cues like gestures, facial expressions, and/or gaze direction to make inferences about what others think, feel, or intend (Adolphs, 1999; Emery, 2000; Gallagher and Frith, 2003)
Results of Experiment 1 showed that, the level of morphing had an overall effect on cognitive conflict and that the supposedly categorically ambiguous 60% morph induced significantly more cognitive conflict than all of other morphed images together when subjects were categorizing the faces as a human or nonhuman
Experiment 2 aimed at examining whether the category boundary face has the ability to disrupt top-down modulation of attention orienting compared to faces that are more distinguishable as either a human or a nonhuman
Summary
We use information from social cues like gestures, facial expressions, and/or gaze direction to make inferences about what others think, feel, or intend (Adolphs, 1999; Emery, 2000; Gallagher and Frith, 2003). Joint attention can be investigated using the gaze-cueing paradigm (Friesen and Kingstone, 1998), where an abstract face stimulus is presented in the center of a screen that first looks straight at the participant and changes its gaze direction to the left or right side of the screen (i.e., gaze cue), which is followed by a target that is presented either at the gazed-at location (i.e., valid trial) or opposite of the gazed-at location (i.e., invalid trial). The few modulatory effects of gaze cueing that were originally reported were strongly dependent on participants’ age (i.e., stronger gaze cueing in children; Hori et al, 2005) and/ or other individual traits (i.e., stronger gaze cueing in highly anxious individuals; Tipples, 2006; Fox et al, 2007)
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