Mental attribution is not sufficient or necessary to trigger attentional orienting to gaze

Effects of interpreting a dynamic geometric cue as gaze on attention allocation

Gaze is a powerful cue for directing attention. We investigate the interpretation of an abstract figure as gaze modulates its efficacy as an attentional cue. In each trial, two vertical lines on a central disk moved to one side (left or right). Independent of this "feature-cued" side, a target (black disk) subsequently appeared on one side. After 300 trials (phase 1), participants watched a video of a human avatar walking away. For one group, the avatar wore a helmet that visually matched the central disk and looked at black disks to either side. The other group's video was unrelated to the cueing task. After another 300 trials (phase 2), videos were swapped between groups; 300 further trials (phase 3) followed. In all phases, participants responded more quickly for targets appearing on the feature-cued side. There was a significant interaction between group and phase for reaction times: In phase 3, the group who had just watched the avatar with the helmet had a reduced advantage to the feature-cued side. Hence, interpreting the disk as a turning head seen from behind counteracts the cueing by the motion of the disk. This suggests that the mere perceptual interpretation of an abstract stimulus as gaze yields social cueing effects.

Can the robot "see" what I see? Robot gaze drives attention depending on mental state attribution

Mentalizing, where humans infer the mental states of others, facilitates understanding and interaction in social situations. Humans also tend to adopt mentalizing strategies when interacting with robotic agents. There is an ongoing debate about how inferred mental states affect gaze following, a key component of joint attention. Although the gaze from a robot induces gaze following, the impact of mental state attribution on robotic gaze following remains unclear. To address this question, we asked forty-nine young adults to perform a gaze cueing task during which mental state attribution was manipulated as follows. Participants sat facing a robot that turned its head to the screen at its left or right. Their task was to respond to targets that appeared either at the screen the robot gazed at or at the other screen. At the baseline, the robot was positioned so that participants would perceive it as being able to see the screens. We expected faster response times to targets at the screen the robot gazed at than targets at the non-gazed screen (i.e., gaze cueing effect). In the experimental condition, the robot's line of sight was occluded by a physical barrier such that participants would perceive it as unable to see the screens. Our results revealed gaze cueing effects in both conditions although the effect was reduced in the occluded condition compared to the baseline. These results add to the expanding fields of social cognition and human-robot interaction by suggesting that mentalizing has an impact on robotic gaze following.

Gaze cueing, mental States, and the effect of autistic traits

The ability to interpret and follow the gaze of our social partners is an integral skill in human communication. Recent research has demonstrated that gaze following behaviour is influenced by theory of mind (ToM) processes. However, it has yet to be determined whether the modulation of gaze cueing by ToM is affected by individual differences, such as autistic traits. The aim of this experiment was to establish whether autistic traits in neurotypical populations affect the mediation of gaze cueing by ToM processes. This study used a gaze cueing paradigm within a change detection task. Participants' perception of a gaze cue was manipulated such that they only believed the cue to be able to 'see' in one condition. The results revealed that participants in the Low Autistic Traits group were significantly influenced by the mental state of the gaze cue and were more accurate on valid trials when they believed the cue could 'see'. By contrast, participants in the High Autistic Traits group were also more accurate on valid trials, but this was not influenced by the mental state of the gaze cue. This study therefore provides evidence that autistic traits influence the extent to which mental state attributions modulate social attention in neurotypical adults.

Early lifetime experience of urban living predicts social attention in real world crowds

More than half of the world's population is currently living in cities, with more and more people moving to densely populated areas. The experience of growing up and living in crowded environments might influence the way we explore our social environment, mainly how we attend to others. Yet, we know little about how urbanicity affects this vital function of our social life. In two studies, we use mobile eye-tracking to measure participants' social attention, while walking through a shopping mall. Results show that social density of participants' native place impacts how frequently they look at passing strangers. People who experienced more city living from birth to early adolescence, attend more to strangers' faces than their rural counterparts. Our findings demonstrate that the early experience of urban upbringing configures social attention in adulthood. The urbanicity-related bias towards social gazing might reflect a more efficient processing of social information in urban natives.

Hidden intentions: Visual awareness prioritizes perceived attention even without eyes or faces

Eye contact is a powerful social signal, and it readily captures attention. Recent work has suggested that direct gaze is prioritized even unconsciously: faces rendered invisible via interocular suppression enter awareness faster when they look directly at (vs. away from) you. Such effects may be driven in a relatively low level way by the special visual properties of eyes, per se, but here we asked whether they might instead arise from the perception of a deeper property: being the focus of another agent's attention and/or intentions. We report five experiments which collectively explore whether visual awareness also prioritizes distinctly non-eye-like stimuli that nevertheless convey directedness. We first showed that directed (vs. averted) 'mouth' shapes also break through into awareness faster, after being rendered invisible by continuous flash suppression - a direct 'gaze' effect without any eyes. But such effects could still be specific to faces (if not eyes), so we next asked whether the prioritization of directed intentions would still occur even for stimuli that have no faces at all. In fact, even simple geometric shapes can be seen as intentional, as when numerous randomly scattered cones are all consistently pointing at you. And indeed, even such directed (vs. averted) cones entered awareness faster - a direct 'gaze' effect without any facial cues. Additional control experiments ruled out effects of both symmetry and response biases. We conclude that the perception of directed intentions is sufficient to boost objects into awareness, and that putative eye-contact effects might instead reflect more general phenomena of 'mind contact'.

Theory of mind affects the interpretation of another person's focus of attention

People are drawn to social, animate things more than inanimate objects. Previous research has also shown gaze following in humans, a process that has been linked to theory of mind (ToM). In three experiments, we investigated whether animacy and ToM are involved when making judgements about the location of a cursor in a scene. In Experiment 1, participants were told that this cursor represented the gaze of an observer and were asked to decide whether the observer was looking at a target object. This task is similar to that carried out by researchers manually coding eye-tracking data. The results showed that participants were biased to perceive the gaze cursor as directed towards animate objects (faces) compared to inanimate objects. In Experiments 2 and 3 we tested the role of ToM, by presenting the same scenes to new participants but now with the statement that the cursor was generated by a ‘random’ computer system or by a computer system designed to seek targets. The bias to report that the cursor was directed toward faces was abolished in Experiment 2, and minimised in Experiment 3. Together, the results indicate that people attach minds to the mere representation of an individual's gaze, and this attribution of mind influences what people believe an individual is looking at.

Prior attentional bias is modulated by social gaze

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.

Repetitive Robot Behavior Impacts Perception of Intentionality and Gaze-Related Attentional Orienting

Gaze behavior is an important social signal between humans as it communicates locations of interest. People typically orient their attention to where others look as this informs about others' intentions and future actions. Studies have shown that humans can engage in similar gaze behavior with robots but presumably more so when they adopt the intentional stance toward them (i.e., believing robot behaviors are intentional). In laboratory settings, the phenomenon of attending toward the direction of others' gaze has been examined with the use of the gaze-cueing paradigm. While the gaze-cueing paradigm has been successful in investigating the relationship between adopting the intentional stance toward robots and attention orienting to gaze cues, it is unclear if the repetitiveness of the gaze-cueing paradigm influences adopting the intentional stance. Here, we examined if the duration of exposure to repetitive robot gaze behavior in a gaze-cueing task has a negative impact on subjective attribution of intentionality. Participants performed a short, medium, or long face-to-face gaze-cueing paradigm with an embodied robot while subjective ratings were collected pre and post the interaction. Results show that participants in the long exposure condition had the smallest change in their intention attribution scores, if any, while those in the short exposure condition had a positive change in their intention attribution, indicating that participants attributed more intention to the robot after short interactions. The results also show that attention orienting to robot gaze-cues was positively related to how much intention was attributed to the robot, but this relationship became more negative as the length of exposure increased. In contrast to subjective ratings, the gaze-cueing effects (GCEs) increased as a function of the duration of exposure to repetitive behavior. The data suggest a tradeoff between the desired number of trials needed for observing various mechanisms of social cognition, such as GCEs, and the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance toward a robot.

Social information rapidly prioritizes overt but not covert attention in a joint spatial cueing task

Coordinating actions with others is crucial for our survival. Our ability to see what others are seeing and to align our visual attention with them facilitates these joint actions. In the present research, we set out to increase our understanding of such joint attention by investigating the extent to which social information would be able to prioritize overt (when moving the eyes to attend) and covert (when shifting attention without eye movements) attention in a joint spatial cueing task. Participants saw a cue and detected a target at the same or a different location alongside an unseen partner of either higher or lower social rank. In a novel twist, participants were led to believe that the cue was connected to the gaze location of their partner. In Experiment 1, where participants were told to not move their eyes (covert attention), the partner's social rank did not change how quickly participants detected targets. But in Experiment 2, where participants were free to move their eyes naturally (overt attention), inhibition of return effects (slower responses to cued than uncued targets) were modulated by their partner's social rank. These social top-down effects occurred already at a short SOA of 150 ms. Our findings suggest that overt attention might provide a key tool for joint action, as it is penetrable for social information at the early stages of information processing.

Attention in naïve psychology

In everyday life, mentalizing is nested in a rich context of cognitive faculties and background information that potentially contribute to its success. Yet, we know little about these modulating effects. Here we propose that humans develop a naïve psychological model of attention (featured as a goal-dependent, intentional relation to the environment) and use this to fine-tune their mentalizing attempts, presuming that the way people represent their environment is influenced by the cognitive priorities (attention) their current intentions create. The attention model provides an opportunity to tailor mental state inferences to the temporary features of the agent whose mind is in the focus of mentalizing. The ability to trace attention is an exceptionally powerful aid for mindreading. Knowledge about the partner's attention provides background information, however being grounded in his current intentions, attention has direct relevance to the ongoing interaction. Furthermore, due to its causal connection to intentions, the output of the attention model remains valid for a prolonged but predictable amount of time: till the evoking intention is in place. The naïve attention model theory is offered as a novel theory on social attention that both incorporates existing evidence and identifies new directions in research.

Gaze deflection reveals how gaze cueing is tuned to extract the mind behind the eyes

Suppose you are surreptitiously looking at someone, and then when they catch you staring at them, you immediately turn away. This is a social phenomenon that almost everyone experiences occasionally. In such experiences-which we will call gaze deflection-the "deflected" gaze is not directed at anything in particular but simply away from the other person. As such, this is a rare instance where we may turn to look in a direction without intending to look there specifically. Here we show that gaze cues are markedly less effective at orienting an observer's attention when they are seen as deflected in this way-even controlling for low-level visual properties. We conclude that gaze cueing is a sophisticated mental phenomenon: It is not merely driven by perceived eye or head motions but is rather well tuned to extract the "mind" behind the eyes.