Abstract
The present study explored how eye contact at different levels of visual awareness influences gaze-induced joint attention. We adopted a spatial-cueing paradigm, in which an averted gaze was used as an uninformative central cue for a joint-attention task. Prior to the onset of the averted-gaze cue, either supraliminal (Experiment 1) or subliminal (Experiment 2) eye contact was presented. The results revealed a larger subsequent gaze-cueing effect following supraliminal eye contact compared to a no-contact condition. In contrast, the gaze-cueing effect was smaller in the subliminal eye-contact condition than in the no-contact condition. These findings suggest that the facilitation effect of eye contact on coordinating social attention depends on visual awareness. Furthermore, subliminal eye contact might have an impact on subsequent social attention processes that differ from supraliminal eye contact. This study highlights the need to further investigate the role of eye contact in implicit social cognition.
Highlights
As a powerful social stimulus, eye contact communicates emotions and social intentions, such as approach-oriented motivations and general interests in the observer (Macrae et al, 2002; Adams and Kleck, 2005; Adams et al, 2006; George and Conty, 2008)
Eye contact often functions as a signal facilitating social interaction, it can be perceived as a threatening signal (Ellsworth et al, 1972; Emery, 2000) or has negative connotations
A 2 × 2 repeated measures ANOVA was conducted with prior eye contact and gaze congruency as within-subject factors
Summary
As a powerful social stimulus, eye contact communicates emotions and social intentions, such as approach-oriented motivations and general interests in the observer (Macrae et al, 2002; Adams and Kleck, 2005; Adams et al, 2006; George and Conty, 2008). Eye contact has been shown to capture attention more readily compared to averted gazes (Senju and Hasegawa, 2005; Vuilleumier et al, 2005; Conty et al, 2006), evoke positive affective responses (Bindemann et al, 2008; Willis et al, 2011; Chen et al, 2017), facilitate face recognition (Vuilleumier et al, 2005), positively affect attractiveness evaluation (Ewing et al, 2010), bias face preference (Jones et al, 2006), trigger self-referential processes (Conty et al, 2016; Hietanen and Hietanen, 2017), and eventually enhance interpersonal synchronization (Patterson, 1982). Subliminally presented eye contact facilitates visual awareness compared to averted gaze in interocular suppression, and is
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