What we observe is biased by what other people tell us: beliefs about the reliability of gaze behavior modulate attentional orienting to gaze cues

For effective social interactions with other people, information about the physical environment must be integrated with information about the interaction partner. In order to achieve this, processing of social information is guided by two components: a bottom-up mechanism reflexively triggered by stimulus-related information in the social scene and a top-down mechanism activated by task-related context information. In the present study, we investigated whether these components interact during attentional orienting to gaze direction. In particular, we examined whether the spatial specificity of gaze cueing is modulated by expectations about the reliability of gaze behavior. Expectations were either induced by instruction or could be derived from experience with displayed gaze behavior. Spatially specific cueing effects were observed with highly predictive gaze cues, but also when participants merely believed that actually non-predictive cues were highly predictive. Conversely, cueing effects for the whole gazed-at hemifield were observed with non-predictive gaze cues, and spatially specific cueing effects were attenuated when actually predictive gaze cues were believed to be non-predictive. This pattern indicates that (i) information about cue predictivity gained from sampling gaze behavior across social episodes can be incorporated in the attentional orienting to social cues, and that (ii) beliefs about gaze behavior modulate attentional orienting to gaze direction even when they contradict information available from social episodes

Deceptive body movements reverse spatial cueing in soccer

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.The purpose of the experiments was to analyse the spatial cueing effects of the movements of soccer players executing normal and deceptive (step-over) turns with the ball. Stimuli comprised normal resolution or point-light video clips of soccer players dribbling a football towards the observer then turning right or left with the ball. Clips were curtailed before or on the turn (-160, -80, 0 or +80 ms) to examine the time course of direction prediction and spatial cueing effects. Participants were divided into higher-skilled (HS) and lower-skilled (LS) groups according to soccer experience. In experiment 1, accuracy on full video clips was higher than on point-light but results followed the same overall pattern. Both HS and LS groups correctly identified direction on normal moves at all occlusion levels. For deceptive moves, LS participants were significantly worse than chance and HS participants were somewhat more accurate but nevertheless substantially impaired. In experiment 2, point-light clips were used to cue a lateral target. HS and LS groups showed faster reaction times to targets that were congruent with the direction of normal turns, and to targets incongruent with the direction of deceptive turns. The reversed cueing by deceptive moves coincided with earlier kinematic events than cueing by normal moves. It is concluded that the body kinematics of soccer players generate spatial cueing effects when viewed from an opponent's perspective. This could create a reaction time advantage when anticipating the direction of a normal move. A deceptive move is designed to turn this cueing advantage into a disadvantage. Acting on the basis of advance information, the presence of deceptive moves primes responses in the wrong direction, which may be only partly mitigated by delaying a response until veridical cues emerge

The neural correlates of social attention: automatic orienting to social and nonsocial cues

Previous evidence suggests that directional social cues (e.g., eye gaze) cause automatic shifts in attention toward gaze direction. It has been proposed that automatic attentional orienting driven by social cues (social orienting) involves a different neural network from automatic orienting driven by nonsocial cues. However, previous neuroimaging studies on social orienting have only compared gaze cues to symbolic cues, which typically engage top-down mechanisms. Therefore, we directly compared the neural activity involved in social orienting to that involved in purely automatic nonsocial orienting. Twenty participants performed a spatial cueing task consisting of social (gaze) cues and automatic nonsocial (peripheral squares) cues presented at short and long stimulus (cue-to-target) onset asynchronies (SOA), while undergoing fMRI. Behaviorally, a facilitation effect was found for both cue types at the short SOA, while an inhibitory effect (inhibition of return: IOR) was found only for nonsocial cues at the long SOA. Imaging results demonstrated that social and nonsocial cues recruited a largely overlapping fronto-parietal network. In addition, social cueing evoked greater activity in occipito-temporal regions at both SOAs, while nonsocial cueing recruited greater subcortical activity, but only for the long SOA (when IOR was found). A control experiment, including central arrow cues, confirmed that the occipito-temporal activity was at least in part due to the social nature of the cue and not simply to the location of presentation (central vs. peripheral). These results suggest an evolutionary trajectory for automatic orienting, from predominantly subcortical mechanisms for nonsocial orienting to predominantly cortical mechanisms for social orienting

Beliefs about the Minds of Others Influence How We Process Sensory Information

Attending where others gaze is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of social cognition. The present study is the first to examine the impact of the attribution of mind to others on gaze-guided attentional orienting and its ERP correlates. Using a paradigm in which attention was guided to a location by the gaze of a centrally presented face, we manipulated participants' beliefs about the gazer: gaze behavior was believed to result either from operations of a mind or from a machine. In Experiment 1, beliefs were manipulated by cue identity (human or robot), while in Experiment 2, cue identity (robot) remained identical across conditions and beliefs were manipulated solely via instruction, which was irrelevant to the task. ERP results and behavior showed that participants' attention was guided by gaze only when gaze was believed to be controlled by a human. Specifically, the P1 was more enhanced for validly, relative to invalidly, cued targets only when participants believed the gaze behavior was the result of a mind, rather than of a machine. This shows that sensory gain control can be influenced by higher-order (task-irrelevant) beliefs about the observed scene. We propose a new interdisciplinary model of social attention, which integrates ideas from cognitive and social neuroscience, as well as philosophy in order to provide a framework for understanding a crucial aspect of how humans' beliefs about the observed scene influence sensory processing

Gaze following is modulated by expectations regarding others’ action goals

Humans attend to social cues in order to understand and predict others' behavior. Facial expressions and gaze direction provide valuable information to infer others' mental states and intentions. The present study examined the mechanism of gaze following in the context of participants' expectations about successive action steps of an observed actor. We embedded a gaze-cueing manipulation within an action scenario consisting of a sequence of naturalistic photographs. Gaze-induced orienting of attention (gaze following) was analyzed with respect to whether the gaze behavior of the observed actor was in line or not with the action-related expectations of participants (i.e., whether the actor gazed at an object that was congruent or incongruent with an overarching action goal). In Experiment 1, participants followed the gaze of the observed agent, though the gaze-cueing effect was larger when the actor looked at an action-congruent object relative to an incongruent object. Experiment 2 examined whether the pattern of effects observed in Experiment 1 was due to covert, rather than overt, attentional orienting, by requiring participants to maintain eye fixation throughout the sequence of critical photographs (corroborated by monitoring eye movements). The essential pattern of results of Experiment 1 was replicated, with the gaze-cueing effect being completely eliminated when the observed agent gazed at an action-incongruent object. Thus, our findings show that covert gaze following can be modulated by expectations that humans hold regarding successive steps of the action performed by an observed agent

Racial Group Membership Is Associated to Gaze-Mediated Orienting in Italy

Viewing a face with averted gaze results in a spatial shift of attention in the corresponding direction, a phenomenon defined as gaze-mediated orienting. In the present paper, we investigated whether this effect is influenced by social factors. Across three experiments, White and Black participants were presented with faces of White and Black individuals. A modified spatial cueing paradigm was used in which a peripheral target stimulus requiring a discrimination response was preceded by a noninformative gaze cue. Results showed that Black participants shifted attention to the averted gaze of both ingroup and outgroup faces, whereas White participants selectively shifted attention only in response to individuals of their same group. Interestingly, the modulatory effect of social factors was context-dependent and emerged only when group membership was situationally salient to participants. It was hypothesized that differences in the relative social status of the two groups might account for the observed asymmetry between White and Black participants. A final experiment ruled out an alternative explanation based on differences in perceptual familiarity with the face stimuli. Overall, these findings strengthen the idea that gaze-mediated orienting is a socially-connoted phenomenon

The developmental trajectory of attentional orienting to socio-biological cues.

It has been proposed that the orienting of attention in the same direction as another’s point of gaze relies on innate brain mechanisms which are present from birth, but direct evidence relating to the influence of eye gaze cues on attentional orienting in young children is limited. In two experiments, 137 children aged 3–10 years old performed an adapted pro-saccade task with centrally presented uninformative eye gaze, finger pointing and arrow pre-cues which were either congruent or incongruent with the direction of target presentations. When the central cue overlapped with presentation of the peripheral target (Experiment 1), children up to 5 years old had difficulty disengaging fixation from central fixation in order to saccade to the target. This effect was found to be particularly marked for eye gaze cues. When central cues were extinguished simultaneously with peripheral target onset (Experiment 2), this effect was greatly reduced. In both experiments finger pointing cues (image of pointing index finger presented at fixation) exerted a strong influence on saccade reaction time to the peripheral stimulus for the youngest group of children (<5 years). Overall the results suggest that although young children are strongly engaged by centrally presented eye gaze cues, the directional influence of such cues on overt attentional orienting is only present in older children, meaning that the effect is unlikely to be dependent upon an innate brain module. Instead, the results are consistent with the existence of stimulus–response associations which develop with age and environmental experience

Gaze following in multiagent contexts: Evidence for a quorum-like principle

Research shows that humans spontaneously follow another individual’s gaze. However, little remains known on how they respond when multiple gaze cues diverge across members of a social group. To address this question, we presented participants with displays depicting three (Experiment 1) or five (Experiment 2) agents showing diverging social cues. In a three-person group, one individual looking at the target (33% of the group) was sufficient to elicit gaze-facilitated target responses. With a five-person group, however, three individuals looking at the target (60% of the group) were necessary to produce the same effect. Gaze following in small groups therefore appears to be based on a quorum-like principle, whereby the critical level of social information needed for gaze following is determined by a proportion of consistent social cues scaled as a function of group size. As group size grows, greater agreement is needed to evoke joint attention

Examining ecological validity in social interaction: problems of visual fidelity, gaze, and social potential

Social interaction is an essential part of the human experience, and much work has been done to study it. However, several common approaches to examining social interactions in psychological research may inadvertently either unnaturally constrain the observed behaviour by causing it to deviate from naturalistic performance, or introduce unwanted sources of variance. In particular, these sources are the differences between naturalistic and experimental behaviour that occur from changes in visual fidelity (quality of the observed stimuli), gaze (whether it is controlled for in the stimuli), and social potential (potential for the stimuli to provide actual interaction). We expand on these possible sources of extraneous variance and why they may be important. We review the ways in which experimenters have developed novel designs to remove these sources of extraneous variance. New experimental designs using a ‘two-person’ approach are argued to be one of the most effective ways to develop more ecologically valid measures of social interaction, and we suggest that future work on social interaction should use these designs wherever possible

Responding to social and symbolic extrafoveal cues: Cue shape trumps biological relevance

Social cues presented at visual fixation have been shown to strongly influence an observer’s attention and response selection. Here we ask whether the same holds for cues (initially) presented away from fixation, more alike how cues are commonly perceived in natural vision. In six experiments, we show that extrafoveally presented cues with a distinct outline, such as pointing hands, rotated heads, and arrow cues result in strong cueing of responses (either to the cue itself, or a cued object). In contrast, cues without a clear outline, such as gazing eyes and direction words have a much weaker effects on participants’ responses to a target cue. We also show that distraction effects on response times are relatively weak, but that strong interference effects can be obtained by measuring mouse trajectories. Eye tracking suggests that gaze cues are slower to respond to because their direction cannot easily be perceived in extrafoveal vision. Together these data suggest that the strength of an extrafoveal cue is determined by the shape of the outline of the cue, rather than its biological relevance (i.e., whether the cue is provided by another human being), and that this shape effect is due to how easily the direction of the cue can be perceived in extrafoveal vision