Watch Out! Magnetoencephalographic Evidence for Early Modulation of Attention Orienting by Fearful Gaze Cueing

Fanny Lachat,Nathalie George,Teresa Farroni,Mark Alexander Williams

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0050499

Abstract

Others’ gaze and emotional facial expression are important cues for the process of attention orienting. Here, we investigated with magnetoencephalography (MEG) whether the combination of averted gaze and fearful expression may elicit a selectively early effect of attention orienting on the brain responses to targets. We used the direction of gaze of centrally presented fearful and happy faces as the spatial attention orienting cue in a Posner-like paradigm where the subjects had to detect a target checkerboard presented at gazed-at (valid trials) or non gazed-at (invalid trials) locations of the screen. We showed that the combination of averted gaze and fearful expression resulted in a very early attention orienting effect in the form of additional parietal activity between 55 and 70 ms for the valid versus invalid targets following fearful gaze cues. No such effect was obtained for the targets following happy gaze cues. This early cue-target validity effect selective of fearful gaze cues involved the left superior parietal region and the left lateral middle occipital region. These findings provide the first evidence for an effect of attention orienting induced by fearful gaze in the time range of C1. In doing so, they demonstrate the selective impact of combined gaze and fearful expression cues in the process of attention orienting.

Highlights

The aim of our study was to test this hypothesis: We investigated the interaction between emotional expression and the orienting of attention induced by gaze in order to examine if an early effect of attention orienting may be elicited by fearful gaze
This study tested the hypothesis that the combination of a fearful expression with an averted gaze cue may result in very early attention orienting effect as assessed by magnetic brain responses to cued versus uncued targets
It adds to the growing number of recent studies which have shown that attention may influence the brain responses to targets in the time range of the C1 [45,46,47,48]

Summary

Introduction

Adaptive behaviour involves the decoding and integration of the many social – verbal as well as non verbal – signals sent by others. The human face is an essential source of such signals. Eye gaze and emotional expression are essential cues in non verbal communication [1,2,3]. The meaning of a given facial signal, here gaze, is dependent on other accompanying information, such as emotional expression. How does the integration of gaze and emotion cues impact on the processes of attention orienting induced by gaze? There have been numerous studies on attention processes related to gaze perception [4–13 see 14], extremely little is known about the integration of emotion and gaze in attention orienting How does the integration of gaze and emotion cues impact on the processes of attention orienting induced by gaze? there have been numerous studies on attention processes related to gaze perception [4–13 see 14], extremely little is known about the integration of emotion and gaze in attention orienting

Objectives

Results

Conclusion