Abstract
Groups of people offer abundant opportunities for social interactions. We used a two-phase task to investigate how social cue numerosity and social information about an individual affected attentional allocation in such multi-agent settings. The learning phase was a standard gaze-cuing procedure in which a stimulus face could be either uninformative or informative about the upcoming target. The test phase was a group-cuing procedure in which the stimulus faces from the learning phase were presented in groups of three. The target could either be cued by the group minority (i.e., one face) or majority (i.e., two faces) or by uninformative or informative stimulus faces. Results showed an effect of cue numerosity, whereby responses were faster to targets cued by the group majority than the group minority. However, responses to targets cued by informative identities included in the group minority were as fast as responses to targets cued by the group majority. Thus, previously learned social information about an individual was able to offset the general enhancement of cue numerosity, revealing a complex interplay between cue numerosity and social information in guiding attention in multi-agent settings.
Highlights
Every day, whether at a park or a supermarket, we encounter multiple people who offer abundant opportunities for social interactions
Gaze following, defined as the spontaneous orienting of attention towards others’ gaze direction (Capozzi & Ristic, 2020), is a basic social attentional behaviour that can occur both overtly and covertly
Research on gaze following in these scenarios shows that gaze direction of the group majority is often prioritised relative to the gaze direction of the group minority indicating that cue numerosity is an important factor in guiding attentional responses to inconsistent gaze directions (Capozzi et al, 2018, 2021; Sun et al, 2017)
Summary
Whether at a park or a supermarket, we encounter multiple people who offer abundant opportunities for social interactions. While some studies have found that learning about individuals’ social competence (Capozzi et al, 2016) increases subsequent gaze-following behaviour, other studies have found that learning about social reliability decreases those behaviours (Dalmaso et al, 2015; Joyce et al, 2016) While both cue numerosity and social information have been found to affect gaze following, an open question remains how and whether these two variables jointly affect gaze following in multi-agent settings. Similar procedures have been previously found effective in instantiating social learning by manipulating social information with respect to the perceived reliability of the stimulus identities (Capozzi et al, 2016; Dalmaso et al, 2015; Rogers et al, 2014) while minimising interaction effects between participants and stimuli due, for example, to perceived similarity (e.g., Dalmaso et al, 2020; see Ciardo et al, 2014)
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