Prior attentional bias is modulated by social gaze
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SHORT REPORT
Prior attentional bias is modulated by social gaze Francesca Capozzi 1
&
Basil Wahn 2 & Jelena Ristic 1 & Alan Kingstone 2
Accepted: 27 October 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Focusing attention is a key cognitive skill, but how the gaze of others affects engaged attention remains relatively unknown. We investigated if participants’ attentional bias toward a location is modulated by the number of people gazing toward or away from it. We presented participants with a nonpredictive directional cue that biased attention towards a specific location. Then, any number of four stimulus faces turned their gaze toward or away from the attended location. When all the faces looked at the attended location participants increased their commitment to it, and response time to targets at that location were speeded. When most or all of the faces looked away from the attended location, attention was withdrawn, and response times were slowed. This study reveals that the gaze of others can penetrate one’s ability to focus attention, which in turn can be both beneficial and costly to one's responses to events in the environment. Keywords Attentional cuing . Gaze cuing . Group attention . Multi-agent contexts . Social attention
Introduction Focusing attention on certain objects and ignoring others is central to our attentional abilities (Wolfe & Horowitz, 2017). But how pliant is this ability? Humans show a general tendency to attend to where others are looking (Zuberbühler, 2008), enhancing the acquisition of key elements in the environment (Capozzi et al., 2016) and facilitating social coordination (van Vugt, 2014). Despite evolutionary advantages, attending to where others are looking could also have unexpected influences on one's goals. At a museum, for example, one might be more inclined to dwell on an artwork that others are looking at as well, or perhaps more precariously, at a social gathering shift their attention away from their partner because several others are looking at someone else. Despite these intuitions, social attention research has focused on an individual’s sensitivity to others’ gaze direction Francesca Capozzi and Basil Wahn contributed equally to this work. * Francesca Capozzi [email protected] 1
Attention and Social Cognition Laboratory, Department of Psychology, McGill University, 1205 Dr Penfield Avenue, Montreal, QC H3A 1B1, Canada
2
Brain, Attention, and Reality Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
without taking into account their current focus of attention (Kingstone et al., 2017). In the gaze-cuing paradigm, for example, participants are asked to maintain fixation on a central computerized face that can look to the left or right (Frischen et al., 2007). Response time (RT) to a target is shorter when it appears at the gazed-at location versus a non-gazed-at location, suggesting that a participant's attention is spontaneously shifted to the gazed-at location (see also Birmingham & Kingstone, 2009
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