Abstract
Although violence is a frequently researched topic, little is known about how different social features influence information gathering from violent interactions. Regions of an interaction that provide contextual information should receive more attention. We predicted the most informative features of a violent social interaction would be faces, points of contact, and objects being held. To test this, we tracked the eyes of 90 participants as they viewed images of social interactions that varied with respect to violence. When viewing violent interactions, participants attended significantly less to faces and significantly more to points of contact. Moreover, first-fixation analysis suggests that some of these biases are present from the beginning of scene-viewing. These findings are the first to demonstrate the visual relevance of faces and contact points in gathering information from violent social interactions. These results also question the attentional dominance of faces in active social scenes, highlighting the importance of using a variety of stimuli and contexts in social cognition research.
Highlights
People display attentional biases towards violent and threatening information across several different domains, including rumors, media, news, and images[18,19,20,21,22]
This suggests that social scenes, and negative or threatening social scenes, may elicit specific visual information gathering patterns relevant to their semantic content
After discarding trials in which total fixation time was less than 3000 ms, we ended up with 6236 unique trials for the full set of 72 images and 1129 unique trials for the 13 images that contained all three Areas of interest (AOIs)
Summary
People display attentional biases towards violent and threatening information across several different domains, including rumors, media, news, and images[18,19,20,21,22]. Low level physical saliency appears to be less predictive of attention in social scenes and negative scenes[17,23,24] This suggests that social scenes, and negative or threatening social scenes, may elicit specific visual information gathering patterns relevant to their semantic content. We assumed that in a social interaction, faces, points of contact between people, and objects being used can be attended to as a means to infer social information such as actor intention. We assumed that in social interactions, and especially in violent ones, objects being held and points of contact would be good sources of information about the intentions and actions of the two people in the scene. We analyzed gaze fixation on three points of interest in violent and non-violent social interactions: Faces, points of contact, and objects being held. Depending on the nature of the social interaction, we expected attention to be allocated differentially to these three areas
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