Social Saliency of the Cue Slows Attention Shifts.

Vassiki Chauhan,Alireza Soltani,Maria Ida Gobbini,Matteo Visconti Di Oleggio Castello

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00738

Abstract

Eye gaze is a powerful cue that indicates where another person’s attention is directed in the environment. Seeing another person’s eye gaze shift spontaneously and reflexively elicits a shift of one’s own attention to the same region in space. Here, we investigated whether reallocation of attention in the direction of eye gaze is modulated by personal familiarity with faces. On the one hand, the eye gaze of a close friend should be more effective in redirecting our attention as compared to the eye gaze of a stranger. On the other hand, the social relevance of a familiar face might itself hold attention and, thereby, slow lateral shifts of attention. To distinguish between these possibilities, we measured the efficacy of the eye gaze of personally familiar and unfamiliar faces as directional attention cues using adapted versions of the Posner paradigm with saccadic and manual responses. We found that attention shifts were slower when elicited by a perceived change in the eye gaze of a familiar individual as compared to attention shifts elicited by unfamiliar faces at short latencies (100 ms). We also measured simple detection of change in direction of gaze in personally familiar and unfamiliar faces to test whether slower attention shifts were due to slower detection. Participants detected changes in eye gaze faster for familiar faces than for unfamiliar faces. Our results suggest that personally familiar faces briefly hold attention due to their social relevance, thereby slowing shifts of attention, even though the direction of eye movements are detected faster in familiar faces.

Highlights

EXPERIMENT 1 In Experiment 1, we investigated attention shifts elicited by the eye gaze of familiar and unfamiliar faces using a target-detection task based on the Posner cueing paradigm, with saccadic reaction time (SRT) as the dependent variable
We found that the participants made significantly more errors on incongruent trials [χ2(1) = 121.35, p < 0.001] and, surprisingly, the longer stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) [χ2(1) = 93.92, p < 0.001] but the familiarity condition did not have a statistically significant effect on the number of errors made [χ2(1) = 0.31, p = 0.72] (Figure 2)
We investigated whether findings reported in Experiment 1 would hold if the response to the attended target did not involve explicit eye movements away from the centrally presented face cue, we tested the same participants in a paradigm that involved a manual response via a button press

Summary

Introduction

Social cues, such as direction of eye gaze and head angle, are effective in redirecting one’s attention to salient aspects of the environment (Friesen and Kingstone, 1998; Driver et al, 1999; Langton and Bruce, 1999; Hoffman and Haxby, 2000; Pelphrey et al, 2003; Senju and Csibra, 2008; Senju and Johnson, 2009). Several studies have demonstrated that perceived eye gaze spontaneously biases spatial attention in the direction of the gaze (Friesen and Kingstone, 1998; Driver et al, 1999; Langton and Bruce, 1999; Hoffman and Haxby, 2000; Pelphrey et al, 2005; Frischen et al, 2007; Senju and Csibra, 2008; Senju and Johnson, 2009) These biases in spatial attention have previously been shown to be susceptible to top-down influences Eye gaze and head position are processed even without awareness, underscoring that detection of these features, and the subsequent effect on spatial attention, can be preconscious and any facilitation or slowing by familiarity may be acting upon a very early stage of processing (Stein et al, 2011; Gobbini et al, 2013a)

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