How attention gates social interactions

A direct comparison of gaze-mediated orienting elicited by schematic and real human faces

During social interactions, we tend to orient our visual attention towards the spatial location indicated by the gaze direction of others. However, modern societies are characterised by the increasing presence of facial stimuli of various natures, often schematic and pertaining to fictional entities, used in contexts such as advertisements or digital interfaces. In this study, we directly compared the impact of eye-gaze belonging to schematic and real faces on visual attention. These two types of stimuli were utilized in three experiments, where either manual (Experiment 1, N = 160; and Experiment 2, N = 160) or oculomotor (Experiment 3, N = 80) responses were recorded. In addition, schematic and real faces were presented either separately within two distinct blocks or intermixed within the same block of trials. The latter manipulation was aimed to test for eventual stronger differences between schematic and real faces in contexts that maximise the comparison processes between the two types of stimuli. In all experiments, a robust gaze-mediated orienting of attention effect emerged, and this was not significantly influenced by either the type of facial stimulus (i.e., schematic or real) or by the intermixed/blocked presentation. Overall, these results suggest that the human social attention system may treat both types of stimuli similarly. This finding suggests that schematic faces can be effectively used in various applied contexts, such as digital interfaces and advertising, without compromising gaze-mediated attentional orienting.

Gaze cues (repeatedly) fail to influence person evaluation

Eye gaze is an important social signal that people generally cannot help but follow, leading to joint attention. Joint attention has been shown to speed basic processing of objects, enhance memory for them, and even affect immediate value-based appraisal by increasing object likability. Here, across 8 experiments, we investigate for the first time whether jointly attending to other faces positively affects their longer-term social value (liking, trust) and attentional value (attention allocation and prioritisation). Emanating the basic gaze cuing paradigm, a central cue face looked towards or away from a 'target' face, which the participant had to respond to. Unbeknownst to participants, some target faces were always looked at (jointly attended - high value) and others were never looked at ('ignored' - low value). In studies 1 to 6, we investigated how these gaze-induced value conditions positively affected subsequent liking and trust social judgements of a person. Then, in studies 7 and 8, we additionally investigated whether effects of gaze on others may occur implicitly, affecting subsequent attentional engagement with others by using the target faces as gaze cues, or attentional targets in a dot probe task. Confirmed through mini meta-analysis, we found no significant effect of being jointly attended versus ignored on either the social (N = 214) or attentional (N = 77) value of faces. We discuss whether faces are different from objects in this context.

Is the precedence of social re-orienting only inherent to the initiators?

Previous researches have revealed that initiators preferentially re-orient their attention towards responders with whom they have established joint attention (JA). However, it remains unclear whether this precedence of social re-orienting is inherent to initiators or applies equally to responders, and whether this social re-orienting is modulated by the social contexts in which JA is achieved. To address these issues, the present study adopted a modified virtual-reality paradigm to manipulate social roles (initiator vs. responder), social behaviours (JA vs. Non-JA), and social contexts (intentional vs. incidental). Results indicated that people, whether as initiators or responders, exhibited a similar prioritisation pattern of social re-orienting, and this was independent of the social contexts in which JA was achieved, revealing that the prioritisation of social re-orienting is an inherent social attentional mechanism in humans. It should be noted, however, that the distinct social cognitive systems engaged when individuals switched roles between initiator and responder were only driven during intentional (Experiment 1) rather than incidental (Experiment 2) JA. These findings provide potential insights for understanding the shared attention system and the integrated framework of attentional and mentalising processes.

Adolescents with autism spectrum disorder exhibit intact physical causal inference but weak intention inference

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show impaired mentalizing skills, specifically in understanding intentions. They have difficulty understanding social situations with multiple cues due to their limited ability to perceive subtle social contextual cues. Studies that used comic strips and the strange stories as intention attribution tests found that individuals with ASD exhibit a reduced ability in attributing intentions compared to inferring causal consequences. This study aims to use static photographs of social scenes taken in everyday settings to investigate the ability of adolescents with ASD to infer intentions in social contexts, and to explore how intention inference relates to working memory and basic attention, including sustained attention, selective attention, and divided attention. The results show that the physical causal inference ability of adolescents with ASD is comparable to typically developing adolescents, whereas intention inference is notably weaker. Furthermore, working memory predicts physical causal inference and divided attention predicts intention inference in ASD.

Social face processing in chronic severe traumatic brain injury: Altered decoding of emotions and mental states but preserved gaze cueing of attention

The processing of social information transmitted by facial stimuli is altered in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). This study investigated whether these alterations also affect the mechanisms underlying the orienting of visual attention in response to eye-gaze signals. TBI patients and a control group of healthy individuals matched on relevant criteria completed a spatial cueing task. In this task, a lateral visual target was presented along with a task-irrelevant face, with the gaze averted to the left or right. Arrows pointing towards the left or right were also used as non-social control stimuli. Social cognition abilities were further investigated through tests based on decoding emotional expressions and mental states conveyed by facial stimuli. The decoding of emotions and mental states was worse in the TBI group than in the control group. However, both groups demonstrated reliable and comparable orienting of attention to both eye-gaze and arrow stimuli. Despite impairments in certain aspects of social face processing among TBI patients, gaze cueing of attention appears to be preserved in this neuropsychological population.

Stretching the limits of automated symbolic orienting

Arrows trigger reflexive shifts of attention and instantiate the prototypical example of automated symbolic orienting. We conducted four experiments to further test the boundary conditions of this phenomenon. Participants discriminated a peripheral target while spatially uninformative arrows, pointing leftwards or rightwards, appeared at fixation. In all experiments, arrow direction could either randomly vary (intermixed condition) or be kept constant within a block of trials (blocked condition). Moreover, in Experiments 3 and 4, a direction word presented at the beginning of the trial informed participants about the target location with 100% certainty. Overall, the results highlighted a significant arrow-driven orienting effect in both the blocked and the intermixed conditions. The present findings support the notion that automated symbolic orienting is resistant to suppression in that it endures even when the context should stress the uninformative nature of the arrows while also creating ideal conditions to boost participants' tendency to ignore them.

Intentional looks facilitate faster responding in observers

Humans construct rich representations of other people's mental states. Here we investigated how intentionality in eye gaze affected perception and responses to gaze. Observers viewed videos of human gazers looking left or right. Unbeknownst to the observers, the gazers could either choose where to look (self-chosen gaze) or were explicitly instructed where to look (computer-instructed gaze). In Experiment 1, observers reported the direction of the gazer's upcoming look before the eye movement was initiated. Faster responses were found for self-chosen relative to computer-instructed gaze. In Experiments 2 and 3, observers responded by reporting the location of a peripheral target that appeared at the gazed-at or not gazed-at location. Faster responses were found for gazed-at relative to not gazed-at targets and at longer cue-target intervals for self-chosen relative to computer-instructed gaze. The examination of the eye movement kinematics indicated that self-chosen gaze shifts were marked by a larger magnitude of motion within the eye region prior to the eye movement occurring relative to computer-instructed ones. Thus, perceived intentionality in eye gaze facilitates responses in observers with the information about mental states communicated via subtle properties of eye motion.

Social excluder's face reduces gaze-triggered attention orienting

Social ostracism, a negative affective experience in interpersonal interactions, is thought to modulate the gaze-cueing effect (GCE). However, it is unclear whether the impact of social exclusion on the GCE is related to the identity of the cueing face. Therefore, the present study employed a two-phase paradigm to address this issue. In the first phase, two groups of participants were instructed to complete a Cyberball game with two virtual avatars to establish a binding relationship between a specific face's identity and the emotions of social exclusion or inclusion. In the second phase, these two virtual avatars (exclusion faces/inclusion faces) and two new faces (control faces) were used as cueing faces in the gaze-cueing task. The results found that, for the exclusion group, the magnitudes of the GCEs for the exclusion and exclusion-control faces were similar in the 200 ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) condition, while the exclusion face's GCE was significantly smaller than that of the exclusion-control face in the 700 ms SOA condition. In contrast, for the inclusion group, the GCEs for inclusion and inclusion-control faces in both the 200 ms SOA and 700 ms SOA conditions did not significantly differ. This study reveals that the effect of social exclusion on the GCE is related to the identity of the cueing face, with individuals more reluctant to follow the gaze direction of excluder and shift their attention and provides experimental evidence that the perception of higher social relations can exert a top-down impact on the processing of social spatial cues.

Eyes meet, hands greet: The art of timing in social interactions

Shaking hands is a fundamental form of social interaction. The current study used high-definition cameras during a university graduation ceremony to examine the temporal sequencing of eye contact and shaking hands. Analyses revealed that mutual gaze always preceded shaking hands. A follow up investigation manipulated gaze when shaking hands, and found that participants take significantly longer to accept a handshake when an outstretched hand precedes eye contact. These findings demonstrate that the timing between a person's gaze and their offer to shake hands is critical to how their action is interpreted.

Social gaze cueing elicits facilitatory and inhibitory effects on movement execution when the model might act on an object

Social cues, such as eye gaze and pointing fingers, can increase the prioritisation of specific locations for cognitive processing. A previous study using a manual reaching task showed that, although both gaze and pointing cues altered target prioritisation (reaction times [RTs]), only pointing cues affected action execution (trajectory deviations). These differential effects of gaze and pointing cues on action execution could be because the gaze cue was conveyed through a disembodied head; hence, the model lacked the potential for a body part (i.e., hands) to interact with the target. In the present study, the image of a male gaze model, whose gaze direction coincided with two potential target locations, was centrally presented. The model either had his arms and hands extended underneath the potential target locations, indicating the potential to act on the targets (Experiment 1), or had his arms crossed in front of his chest, indicating the absence of potential to act (Experiment 2). Participants reached to a target that followed a nonpredictive gaze cue at one of three stimulus onset asynchronies. RTs and reach trajectories of the movements to cued and uncued targets were analysed. RTs showed a facilitation effect for both experiments, whereas trajectory analysis revealed facilitatory and inhibitory effects, but only in Experiment 1 when the model could potentially act on the targets. The results of this study suggested that when the gaze model had the potential to interact with the cued target location, the model's gaze affected not only target prioritisation but also movement execution.

Neural basis of social attention: common and distinct mechanisms for social and nonsocial orienting stimuli

Social and nonsocial directional stimuli (such as gaze and arrows, respectively) share their ability to trigger attentional processes, although the issue of whether social stimuli generate other additional (and unique) attentional effects is still under debate. In this study, we used the spatial interference paradigm to explore, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, shared and dissociable brain activations produced by gaze and arrows. Results showed a common set of regions (right parieto-temporo-occipital) similarly involved in conflict resolution for gaze and arrows stimuli, which showed stronger co-activation for incongruent than congruent trials. The frontal eye field showed stronger functional connectivity with occipital regions for congruent as compared with incongruent trials, and this effect was enhanced for gaze as compared with arrow stimuli in the right hemisphere. Moreover, spatial interference produced by incongruent (as compared with congruent) arrows was associated with increased functional coupling between the right frontal eye field and a set of regions in the left hemisphere. This result was not observed for incongruent (as compared with congruent) gaze stimuli. The right frontal eye field also showed greater coupling with left temporo-occipital regions for those conditions in which larger conflict was observed (arrow incongruent vs. gaze incongruent trials, and gaze congruent vs. arrow congruent trials). These findings support the view that social and nonsocial stimuli share some attentional mechanisms, while at the same time highlighting other differential effects. Highlights Attentional orienting triggered by social (gaze) and nonsocial (arrow) cues is comparable. When social and nonsocial stimuli are used as targets, qualitatively different behavioral effects are observed. This study explores the neural bases of shared and dissociable neural mechanisms for social and nonsocial stimuli. Shared mechanisms were found in the functional coupling between right parieto-temporo-occipital regions. Dissociable mechanisms were found in the functional coupling between right frontal eye field and ipsilateral and contralateral occipito-temporal regions.

Are eyes special? Gaze, but not pointing gestures, elicits a reversed congruency effect in a spatial Stroop task

Gaze stimuli can shape attention in a peculiar way as compared to non-social stimuli. For instance, in a spatial Stroop task, gaze stimuli elicit a reversed congruency effect (i.e., faster responses on incongruent than on congruent trials) as compared to arrows, for which a standard congruency effect emerges. Here, we tested whether the reversed congruency effect observed for gaze can emerge for other social signals such as pointing gestures. Participants discriminated the direction (left or right) indicated by gaze and pointing finger stimuli that appeared leftwards or rightwards with respect to a central fixation spot. Arrows were also employed as control non-social stimuli. A reversed congruency effect emerged for the gaze, whereas a standard congruency effect emerged for both the pointing finger and the arrows. This suggests that the reversed congruency effect is specific to gaze stimuli and does not embrace all social signals conveying spatial information.

Foot cues can elicit covert orienting of attention

Humans tend to orient their attentional resources towards the same location indicated by spatial signals coming from the others, such as pointing fingers, head turns, or eye-gaze. Here, two experiments investigated whether an attentional orienting response can be elicited even by foot cues. Participants were asked to localize a peripheral target while a task-irrelevant picture of a naked human foot, oriented leftward or rightward, was presented on the centre of the screen. The foot appeared in a neutral posture (i.e., standing upright) or an action-oriented posture (i.e., walking/running). In Experiment 1, neutral and action-oriented feet were presented in two distinct blocks, while in Experiment 2 they were presented intermixed. The results showed that the action-oriented foot, but not the neutral one, elicited an orienting response, though this only emerged in Experiment 2. This work suggests that attentional shifts can be induced by action-oriented foot cues, as long as these stimuli are made contextually salient.

Predicting the attention of others

As social animals, people are highly sensitive to the attention of others. Seeing someone else gaze at an object automatically draws one's own attention to that object. Monitoring the attention of others aids in reconstructing their emotions, beliefs, and intentions and may play a crucial role in social alignment. Recently, however, it has been suggested that the human brain constructs a predictive model of other people's attention that is far more involved than a moment-by-moment monitoring of gaze direction. The hypothesized model learns the statistical patterns in other people's attention and extrapolates how attention is likely to move. Here, we tested the hypothesis of a predictive model of attention. Subjects saw movies of attention displayed as a bright spot shifting around a scene. Subjects were able to correctly distinguish natural attention sequences (based on eye tracking of prior participants) from altered sequences (e.g., played backward or in a scrambled order). Even when the attention spot moved around a blank background, subjects could distinguish natural from scrambled sequences, suggesting a sensitivity to the spatial-temporal statistics of attention. Subjects also showed an ability to recognize the attention patterns of different individuals. These results suggest that people possess a sophisticated model of the normal statistics of attention and can identify deviations from the model. Monitoring attention is therefore more than simply registering where someone else's eyes are pointing. It involves predictive modeling, which may contribute to our remarkable social ability to predict the mind states and behavior of others.

Focused attention: its key role in gaze and arrow cues for determining where attention is directed

Others' gaze direction and traffic arrow signal lights play significant roles in guiding observers' attention in daily life. Previous studies have shown that gaze and arrow cues can direct attention to the cued location. However, it is ambiguous where gaze and arrow cues guide attention: the cued location or a broader cued region. Therefore, the present study adopted a primary cue-target task and manipulated possible target locations to explore this issue. The results revealed that due to the different physical characteristics of non-predictive gaze and arrow cues, physically unfocused-pointing gaze cues guided attention to a broader cued region, whereas focused-pointing arrow cues guided attention to the exact cued location. Furthermore, gaze cues could also direct attention to the exact cued location when observers' attention was focused in a top-down manner (with highly predictive probability). These findings suggest that where gaze and arrow cues direct attention depends on whether observers' attention is focused by the cues, either in a bottom-up or top-down manner. Accordingly, a preliminary framework called the "Focused-Diffused Attentional Orienting Model" is proposed to explain how gaze and arrow cues direct humans' attention. The present study enhances our understanding of human attentional orienting systems from a behavioral perspective.

Inferential eye movement control while following dynamic gaze

Attending to other people's gaze is evolutionary important to make inferences about intentions and actions. Gaze influences covert attention and triggers eye movements. However, we know little about how the brain controls the fine-grain dynamics of eye movements during gaze following. Observers followed people's gaze shifts in videos during search and we related the observer eye movement dynamics to the time course of gazer head movements extracted by a deep neural network. We show that the observers' brains use information in the visual periphery to execute predictive saccades that anticipate the information in the gazer's head direction by 190-350ms. The brain simultaneously monitors moment-to-moment changes in the gazer's head velocity to dynamically alter eye movements and re-fixate the gazer (reverse saccades) when the head accelerates before the initiation of the first forward gaze-following saccade. Using saccade-contingent manipulations of the videos, we experimentally show that the reverse saccades are planned concurrently with the first forward gaze-following saccade and have a functional role in reducing subsequent errors fixating on the gaze goal. Together, our findings characterize the inferential and functional nature of social attention's fine-grain eye movement dynamics.

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.

The influence of perceptual load on gaze-induced attentional orienting: The modulation of expectation

Humans tend to focus on others' gaze. Previous studies have shown that the gaze direction of others can induce corresponding attentional orienting. However, gaze cues have typically been presented alone in these studies. It is unclear how gaze cues induce observers' attention in complicated contexts with additional perceptual information. Therefore, the present study investigated gaze-induced attentional orienting at different levels of perceptual load. Results indicated that the attentional effect of the dynamic gaze cue (i.e., GCE: gaze cue effect) emerged under low perceptual load and disappeared under high perceptual load. The absence of GCE could not attribute to perceptual capacity exhaustion. Moreover, the influence of perceptual load on gaze-induced attentional orienting was modulated by individuals' expectation. Specifically, the GCE occurred under high perceptual load when the gaze cue was predictive (with individuals' expectation). These findings provide new evidence on the mode of gaze-induced attentional orienting under different perceptual load conditions.

A dual mobile eye tracking study on natural eye contact during live interactions

Human eyes convey a wealth of social information, with mutual looks representing one of the hallmark gaze communication behaviors. However, it remains relatively unknown if such reciprocal communication requires eye-to-eye contact or if general face-to-face looking is sufficient. To address this question, while recording looking behavior in live interacting dyads using dual mobile eye trackers, we analyzed how often participants engaged in mutual looks as a function of looking towards the top (i.e., the Eye region) and bottom half of the face (i.e., the Mouth region). We further examined how these different types of mutual looks during an interaction connected with later gaze-following behavior elicited in an individual experimental task. The results indicated that dyads engaged in mutual looks in various looking combinations (Eye-to-eye, Eye-to-mouth, and Mouth-to-Mouth) but proportionately spent little time in direct eye-to-eye gaze contact. However, the time spent in eye-to-eye contact significantly predicted the magnitude of later gaze following response elicited by the partner's gaze direction. Thus, humans engage in looking patterns toward different face parts during interactions, with direct eye-to-eye looks occurring relatively infrequently; however, social messages relayed during eye-to-eye contact appear to carry key information that propagates to affect subsequent individual social behavior.

Linguistic identity as a modulator of gaze cueing of attention

Eye-gaze stimuli can elicit orienting of attention in an observer, a phenomenon known as gaze cueing of attention. Here, we explored whether gaze cueing can be shaped by the linguistic identity of the cueing face. In two experiments, participants were first familiarized with different faces together with auditory sentences. Half of the sentences were associated with the native language of the participants (Italian) and the other half with an unknown language (Albanian and Basque, in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). In a second phase, participants performed a gaze-cueing task. In a third recognition phase, the auditory sentences were presented again, and participants were required to decide which face uttered each sentence. Results indicated that participants were more likely to confuse faces from the same language category than from the other language category. Results of the gaze-cueing task revealed a greater gaze-cueing effect for faces associated with the native vs. unknown language. Critically, this difference emerged only in Experiment 1, which may reflect differences in social status between the two language groups. Our findings revealed the impact of language as a social cue on the gaze-cueing effect, suggesting that social attention is sensitive to the language of our interlocutors.

Associations of Empathy with Teacher-Student Interactions: A Potential Ternary Model

Empathy has garnered increasing recognition as a pivotal component of teacher-student interactions and a notable determinant of student achievement. Nevertheless, the exact impact of empathy on teacher-student interactions remains elusive, despite research endeavors into the neural mechanisms of teacher empathy. Our article examines the cognitive neural processes of teacher empathy during various forms of teacher-student interactions. To this end, we first present a concise review of theoretical considerations related to empathy and interactions, followed by an extensive discussion of teacher-student interactions and teacher empathy through both "single-brain" and "dual-brain" perspectives. Drawing on these discussions, we propose a potential model of empathy that integrates the affective contagion, cognitive evaluation, and behavior prediction aspects of teacher-student interactions. Finally, future research directions are discussed.

The Effects of Social Processing and Role Type on Attention Networks: Insights from Team Ball Athletes

(1) Background: Several findings have shown how social stimuli can influence attentional processes. Social attention is crucial in team ball sports, in which players have to react to dynamically changing, unpredictable, and externally paced environments. Our study aimed at demonstrating the influence of social processing on team ball sports athletes’ attentional abilities. (2) Methods: A total of 103 male players divided by sport (soccer, handball, and basketball) and by role (striker, midfielder, or defender) were tested through a modified version of the Attention Network Test (ANT) in which they were exposed to both social and non-social stimuli. (3) Results: Social stimuli positively impacted the athletes’ abilities to focus on target stimuli and ignore conflicting environmental requests (t = −2.600, p = 0.011 *). We also found that the athletes’ roles impacted their performance accuracy. Specifically, differences were found in the ability to maintain a general state of reactivity between athletes (strikers vs. midfielders: t = 3.303, p = 0.004 **; striker vs. defenders: t = −2.820, p = 0.017 *; midfielders vs. defenders: t = −5.876, p < 001 ***). (4) Conclusion: These findings revealed that social stimuli are crucial for performance enhancement in team ball sports athletes. Further, we suggest that it is possible to draw specific attentional profiles for athletes in different roles.

Can masked gaze and arrow stimuli elicit overt orienting of attention? A registered report

Viewing an averted gaze can elicit saccades towards the corresponding location. Here, the automaticity of this gaze-following behaviour phenomenon was further tested by exploring whether such an effect can be detected in response to briefly-presented masked averted gazes. Participants completed an oculomotor interference task consisting of making leftward/rightward saccades according to a symbolic instruction cue. Crucially, either a task-irrelevant averted-gaze face or an arrow (i.e., a non-social control stimulus) was also presented in different blocks of trials. Faces and arrows were presented for either 1000 ms, or 8 ms and then backward-masked, to reduce the likelihood of conscious processing. Worse oculomotor performance emerged when the saccade direction did not match (vs match) that suggested by the task-irrelevant gaze/arrow stimuli in the unmasked condition. However, in the masked condition, no oculomotor interference occurred for any task-irrelevant stimulus. Results enrich knowledge about boundary conditions for gaze/arrow-driven orienting using ecological attention measures.

Eye-Gaze direction triggers a more specific attentional orienting compared to arrows

Numerous studies have shown that eye-gaze and arrows automatically shift visuospatial attention. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether the attentional shifts triggered by these two types of stimuli differ in some important aspects. It has been suggested that an important difference may reside in how people select objects in response to these two types of cues, eye-gaze eliciting a more specific attentional orienting than arrows. To assess this hypothesis, we examined whether the allocation of the attentional orienting triggered by eye-gaze and arrows is modulated by the presence and the distribution of reference objects (i.e., placeholders) on the scene. Following central cues, targets were presented either in an empty visual field or within one of six placeholders on each trial. In Experiment 2, placeholder-objects were grouped following the gestalt's law of proximity, whereas in Experiment 1, they were not perceptually grouped. Results showed that cueing one of the grouped placeholders spreads attention across the whole group of placeholder-objects when arrow cues were used, while it restricted attention to the specific cued placeholder when eye-gaze cues were used. No differences between the two types of cues were observed when placeholder-objects were not grouped within the cued hemifield, or no placeholders were displayed on the scene. These findings are consistent with the idea that socially relevant gaze cues encourage a more specific attentional orienting than arrow cues and provide new insight into the boundary conditions necessary to observe this dissociation.

Explicit vs. implicit spatial processing in arrow vs. eye-gaze spatial congruency effects

Arrows and gaze stimuli lead to opposite spatial congruency effects. While standard congruency effects are observed for arrows (faster responses for congruent conditions), responses are faster when eye-gaze stimuli are presented on the opposite side of the gazed-at location (incongruent trials), leading to a reversed congruency effect (RCE). Here, we explored the effects of implicit vs. explicit processing of arrows and eye-gaze direction. Participants were required to identify the direction (explicit task) or the colour (implicit task) of left or right looking/pointing gaze or arrows, presented to either the left or right of the fixation point. When participants responded to the direction of stimuli, standard congruency effects for arrows and RCE for eye-gaze stimuli were observed. However, when participants responded to the colour of stimuli, no congruency effects were observed. These results suggest that it is necessary to explicitly pay attention to the direction of eye-gaze and arrows for the congruency effect to occur. The same pattern of data was observed when participants responded either manually or verbally, demonstrating that manual motor components are not responsible for the results observed. These findings are not consistent with some hypotheses previously proposed to explain the RCE observed with eye-gaze stimuli and, therefore, call for an alternative plausible hypothesis.

Are there quantitative differences between eye-gaze and arrow cues? A meta-analytic answer to the debate and a call for qualitative differences

Gaze acts from an early age as a cue to orient attention and, thereafter, to infer our social partners' intentions, thoughts, and emotions. Variants of the attentional orienting paradigm have been used to study the orienting capabilities associated to eye gaze. However, to date, it is still unclear whether this methodology truly assesses "social-specific" processes exclusively involved in attention to eye-gaze or the operation of domain-general attentional processes. The present study provides a comprehensive meta-analysis indicating that eye-gaze and non-social directional stimuli, such as arrows, produce equivalent attentional effects. This result casts doubt on the potential utility of the classic cueing task in revealing social-specific processes. On the other hand, we review behavioral evidence suggesting that eye-gaze stimuli may induce higher-order social processes when more specific experimental procedures that analyze qualitative rather than quantitative differences are used. These findings point to an integrated view in which domain-general and social specific processes both contribute to the attentional mechanisms induced by eye-gaze direction. Finally, some proposals about the social components specifically triggered by eye-gaze stimuli are discussed.

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.

Are you paying attention to me? The effect of social presence on spatial attention to gaze and arrows

Prior research has shown that the presence of another individual and type of attention cue (social gaze vs. nonsocial arrow) can modulate attention, with little done to integrate the two. We thus investigate the role of two social presence factors when completing a joint cueing task with either social (gaze) or nonsocial (arrow) cues. Familiarity was operationalized as participants engaged in a prompted conversation either before (n = 60 dyads) or after (n = 59 dyads) the task. To determine the effect of previous responder identity on attention, we contrasted trials where participants responded twice in a row (same responder) with switch trials (different responder), along with whether the previous target was in the same or a different location. Although familiarity only affected global speed and not magnitudes of cueing, we did find that attention to gaze and arrows was differentially affected by previous responder and previous target location. Specifically, for gaze cues muted cueing effects occurred for trials where the previous responder was different, while for arrow cues there was less muting of the cueing effect regardless of previous responder. Taken together, previous responder and previous target location both modulated attention, with the effect on attention dependent on the type of cue, gaze, or arrow.

Exploring the Social Environment with the Eyes: A Review of the Impact of Facial Stimuli on Saccadic Trajectories

Eye movement parameters can be highly informative regarding how people explore the social environment around them. This theoretical review examines how human faces and their features (e.g., eye-gaze direction, emotional expressions) can modulate saccadic trajectories. In the first part, studies in which facial stimuli were presented in a central location, such as during a face-to-face social interaction, are illustrated. The second part focuses on studies in which facial stimuli were placed in the periphery. Together, these works confirm the presence of an intriguing link between eye movements and facial processing, and invite consideration of saccadic trajectories as a useful (and still underused) opportunity to track ongoing mechanisms that support the social vision. Some directions for future research are also discussed.

The (un)learning of social functions and its significance for mental health

Social interactions are dynamic, context-dependent, and reciprocal events that influence prospective strategies and require constant practice and adaptation. This complexity of social interactions creates several research challenges. We propose a new framework encouraging future research to investigate not only individual differences in capacities relevant for social functioning and their underlying mechanisms, but also the flexibility to adapt or update one's social abilities. We suggest three key capacities relevant for social functioning: (1) social perception, (2) sharing emotions or empathizing, and (3) mentalizing. We elaborate on how adaptations in these capacities may be investigated on behavioral and neural levels. Research on these flexible adaptations of one's social behavior is needed to specify how humans actually "learn to be social". Learning to adapt implies plasticity of the relevant brain networks involved in the underlying social processes, indicating that social abilities are malleable for different contexts. To quantify such measures, researchers need to find ways to investigate learning through dynamic changes in adaptable social paradigms and examine several factors influencing social functioning within the three aformentioned social key capacities. This framework furthers insight concerning individual differences, provides a holistic approach to social functioning, and may improve interventions for ameliorating social abilities in patients.

Tuning social modulations of gaze cueing via contextual factors

Gaze cueing reflects the tendency to shift attention toward a location cued by the averted gaze of others. This effect does not fulfill criteria for strong automaticity because its magnitude is sensitive to the manipulation of different social features. Recent theoretical perspectives suggest that social modulations of gaze cueing could further critically depend on contextual factors. In this study, we tested this idea, relying on previous evidence showing that Chinese participants are more sensitive to gazes on White than on Asian faces, likely as a consequence of differences in perceived social status. We replicated this effect when we made group membership salient by presenting faces belonging to the different ethnicities in the same block. In contrast, when faces belonging to different ethnicities were presented in separate blocks, a similar gaze-cueing effect was noted, likely because no social comparison processes were activated. These findings are consistent with the idea that social modulations are not rigid but are tuned by contextual factors.

Processing of task-irrelevant sounds during typical everyday activities in children

Our ability to focus on a task and ignore task-irrelevant stimuli is critical for efficient cognitive functioning. Attention control is especially required in the auditory modality as sound has privileged access to perception and consciousness. Despite this important function, little is known about auditory attention during typical everyday activities in childhood. We investigated the impact of task-irrelevant sounds on attention during three everyday activities - playing a game, reading a book, watching a movie. During these activities, environmental novel sounds were presented within a sequence of standard sounds to 7-8-year-old children and adults. We measured ERPs reflecting early sound processing and attentional orienting and theta power evoked by standard and novel sounds during these activities. Playing a game versus reading or watching reduced early encoding of sounds in children and affected ongoing information processing and attention allocation in both groups. In adults, theta power was reduced during playing at mid-central brain areas. Results show a pattern of immature neuronal mechanisms underlying perception and attention of task-irrelevant sounds in 7-8-year-old children. While the type of activity affected the processing of irrelevant sounds in both groups, early stimulus encoding processes were more sensitive to the type of activities in children.

Wearing the face mask affects our social attention over space

Recent studies suggest that covering the face inhibits the recognition of identity and emotional expressions. However, it might also make the eyes more salient, since they are a reliable index to orient our social and spatial attention. This study investigates (1) whether the pervasive interaction with people with face masks fostered by the COVID-19 pandemic modulates the processing of spatial information essential to shift attention according to other's eye-gaze direction (i.e., gaze-cueing effect: GCE), and (2) whether this potential modulation interacts with motor responses (i.e., Simon effect). Participants were presented with face cues orienting their gaze to a congruent or incongruent target letter location (gaze-cueing paradigm) while wearing a surgical mask (Mask), a patch (Control), or nothing (No-Mask). The task required to discriminate the identity of the lateralized target letters by pressing one of two lateralized response keys, in a corresponding or a non-corresponding position with respect to the target. Results showed that GCE was not modulated by the presence of the Mask, but it occurred in the No-Mask condition, confirming previous studies. Crucially, the GCE interacted with Simon effect in the Mask and Control conditions, though in different ways. While in the Mask condition the GCE emerged only when target and response positions corresponded (i.e., Simon-corresponding trials), in the Control condition it emerged only when they did not correspond (i.e., Simon-non-corresponding trials). These results indicate that people with face masks induce us to jointly orient our visual attention in the direction of the seen gaze (GCE) in those conditions resembling (or associated with) a general approaching behavior (Simon-corresponding trials). This is likely promoted by the fact that we tend to perceive wearing the mask as a personal safety measure and, thus, someone wearing the face mask is perceived as a trustworthy person. In contrast, people with a patch on their face can be perceived as more threatening, therefore inducing a GCE in those conditions associated with a general avoidance behavior (Simon-non-corresponding trials).

Direct Gaze Holds Attention, but Not in Individuals with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

The attentional response to eye-gaze stimuli is still largely unexplored in individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Here, we focused on an attentional phenomenon according to which a direct-gaze face can hold attention in a perceiver. Individuals with OCD and a group of matched healthy controls were asked to discriminate, through a speeded manual response, a peripheral target. Meanwhile, a task-irrelevant face displaying either direct gaze (in the eye-contact condition) or averted gaze (in the no-eye-contact condition) was also presented at the centre of the screen. Overall, the latencies were slower for faces with direct gaze than for faces with averted gaze; however, this difference was reliable in the healthy control group but not in the OCD group. This suggests the presence of an unusual attentional response to direct gaze in this clinical population.

The Bidirectional Social-Cognitive Mechanisms of the Social-Attention Symptoms of Autism

Differences in social attention development begin to be apparent in the 6th to 12th month of development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and theoretically reflect important elements of its neurodevelopmental endophenotype. This paper examines alternative conceptual views of these early social attention symptoms and hypotheses about the mechanisms involved in their development. One model emphasizes mechanism involved in the spontaneous allocation of attention to faces, or social orienting. Alternatively, another model emphasizes mechanisms involved in the coordination of attention with other people, or joint attention, and the socially bi-directional nature of its development. This model raises the possibility that atypical responses of children to the attention or the gaze of a social partner directed toward themselves may be as important in the development of social attention symptoms as differences in the development of social orienting. Another model holds that symptoms of social attention may be important to early development, but may not impact older individuals with ASD. The alterative model is that the social attention symptoms in infancy (social orienting and joint attention), and social cognitive symptoms in childhood and adulthood share common neurodevelopmental substrates. Therefore, differences in early social attention and later social cognition constitute a developmentally continuous axis of symptom presentation in ASD. However, symptoms in older individuals may be best measured with in vivo measures of efficiency of social attention and social cognition in social interactions rather than the accuracy of response on analog tests used in measures with younger children. Finally, a third model suggests that the social attention symptoms may not truly be a symptom of ASD. Rather, they may be best conceptualized as stemming from differences domain general attention and motivation mechanisms. The alternative argued for here that infant social attention symptoms meet all the criteria of a unique dimension of the phenotype of ASD and the bi-directional phenomena involved in social attention cannot be fully explained in terms of domain general aspects of attention development.

Increased gaze cueing of attention during COVID-19 lockdown

Affiliation with others is a basic human need. The lockdown implemented for counteracting the COVID-19 pandemic has determined an unprecedented situation of social deprivation, forcing individuals to dramatically reduce face-to-face interactions. This, in turn, has caused relevant consequences on psychological well-being. However, the impact of lockdown-related social isolation on basic cognitive processes is still largely unknown. Here, we focus on social attention and address gaze cueing, namely the ability to shift attention in response to the gaze of others. This is a hard-wired cognitive mechanism critically supporting the establishment of social interactions and pervasive relationships among individuals. Our results show a stronger gaze-cueing effect during, rather than after, the lockdown, whose magnitude was positively correlated with social isolation distress. These findings indicate that, in a condition of prolonged social deprivation, orienting of attention may be shaped by hypersensitivity to social cues, likely due to the strive to reconnect with others.

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The impact of COVID-19 lockdown on cognitive processes is still largely unexplored

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We focus on gaze cueing of attention as a building block of social interaction

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Gaze cueing was larger during the lockdown than after the lockdown

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Social deprivation is associated with increased sensitivity to the eyes of others

Face Masks Do Not Alter Gaze Cueing of Attention: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic

Interacting with others wearing a face mask has become a regular worldwide practice since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the impact of face masks on cognitive mechanisms supporting social interaction is still largely unexplored. In the present work, we focused on gaze cueing of attention, a phenomenon tapping the essential ability which allows individuals to orient their attentional resources in response to eye gaze signals coming from others. Participants from both a European (i.e., Italy; Experiment 1) and an Asian (i.e., China; Experiment 2) country were involved, namely two countries in which the daily use of face masks before COVID-19 pandemic was either extremely uncommon or frequently adopted, respectively. Both samples completed a task in which a peripheral target had to be discriminated while a task irrelevant averted gaze face, wearing a mask or not, acted as a central cueing stimulus. Overall, a reliable and comparable gaze cueing emerged in both experiments, independent of the mask condition. These findings suggest that gaze cueing of attention is preserved even when the person perceived is wearing a face mask.

Tablet PC use directly affects children's perception and attention

Children currently grow up with a marked increase in interactive digital mobile media. To what extent digital media directly modulate children’s perception and attention is largely unknown. We investigated the processing of task-irrelevant auditory information while 37 children aged 6;8–9;1-years played the identical card game on a tablet PC or with the experimenter in reality. The sound sequence included repeated standard sounds and occasionally novel sounds. Event-related potentials in the EEG, that reflect sound-related processes of perception and attention, were measured. Sounds evoked increased amplitudes of the ERP components P1, P2 and P3a during the interaction with the tablet PC compared to the human interaction. This indicates enhanced early processing of task-irrelevant information and increased allocation of attention to sounds throughout the interaction with a tablet PC compared to a human partner. Results suggest direct effects of typical situations, where children interact with a tablet PC, on neuronal mechanisms that drive perception and attention in the developing brain. More research into this phenomena is required to make specific suggestions for developing digital interactive learning programs.

Cross-cultural asymmetries in oculomotor interference elicited by gaze distractors belonging to Asian and White faces

The averted gaze of others triggers reflexive attentional orienting in the corresponding direction. This phenomenon can be modulated by many social factors. Here, we used an eye-tracking technique to investigate the role of ethnic membership in a cross-cultural oculomotor interference study. Chinese and Italian participants were required to perform a saccade whose direction might be either congruent or incongruent with the averted-gaze of task-irrelevant faces belonging to Asian and White individuals. The results showed that, for Chinese participants, White faces elicited a larger oculomotor interference than Asian faces. By contrast, Italian participants exhibited a similar oculomotor interference effect for both Asian and White faces. Hence, Chinese participants found it more difficult to suppress eye-gaze processing of White rather than Asian faces. The findings provide converging evidence that social attention can be modulated by social factors characterizing both the face stimulus and the participants. The data are discussed with reference to possible cross-cultural differences in perceived social status.

Standing out from the crowd: Both cue numerosity and social information affect attention in multi-agent contexts

Groups of people offer abundant opportunities for social interactions. We used a two-phase task to investigate how social cue numerosity and social information about an individual affected attentional allocation in such multi-agent settings. The learning phase was a standard gaze-cuing procedure in which a stimulus face could be either uninformative or informative about the upcoming target. The test phase was a group-cuing procedure in which the stimulus faces from the learning phase were presented in groups of three. The target could either be cued by the group minority (i.e., one face) or majority (i.e., two faces) or by uninformative or informative stimulus faces. Results showed an effect of cue numerosity, whereby responses were faster to targets cued by the group majority than the group minority. However, responses to targets cued by informative identities included in the group minority were as fast as responses to targets cued by the group majority. Thus, previously learned social information about an individual was able to offset the general enhancement of cue numerosity, revealing a complex interplay between cue numerosity and social information in guiding attention in multi-agent settings.

Investigating facilitatory versus inhibitory effects of dynamic social and non-social cues on attention in a realistic space

This study aimed to investigate the facilitatory versus inhibitory effects of dynamic non-predictive central cues presented in a realistic environment. Realistic human-avatars initiated eye contact and then dynamically looked to the left, right or centre of a table. A moving stick served as a non-social control cue and participants localised (Experiment 1) or discriminated (Experiment 2) a contextually relevant target (teapot/teacup). The cues movement took 500 ms and stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA, 150 ms/300 ms/500 ms/1000 ms) were measured from movement initiation. Similar cuing effects were seen for the social avatar and non-social stick cue across tasks. Results showed facilitatory processes without inhibition, though there was some variation by SOA and task. This is the first time facilitatory versus inhibitory processes have been directly investigated where eye contact is initiated prior to gaze shift. These dynamic stimuli allow a better understanding of how attention might be cued in more realistic environments.

Superior Detection of Faces in Male Infants at 2 Months

Females generally attend more to social information than males; however, little is known about the early development of these sex differences. With eye tracking, 2-month olds' (N = 101; 44 females) social orienting to faces was measured within four-item image arrays. Infants were more likely to detect human faces compared to objects, suggesting a functional face detection system. Unexpectedly, males looked longer at human faces than females, and only males looked faster and longer at human faces compared to objects. Females, in contrast, looked less at human faces relative to animal faces and objects, appearing socially disinterested. Notably, this is the first report of a male face detection advantage at any age. These findings suggest a unique stage in early infant social development.

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.

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.

Pre-exposure to Ambiguous Faces Modulates Top-Down Control of Attentional Orienting to Counterpredictive Gaze Cues

Understanding and reacting to others' nonverbal social signals, such as changes in gaze direction (i.e., gaze cue), are essential for social interactions, as it is important for processes such as joint attention and mentalizing. Although attentional orienting in response to gaze cues has a strong reflexive component, accumulating evidence shows that it can be top-down controlled by context information regarding the signals' social relevance. For example, when a gazer is believed to be an entity "with a mind" (i.e., mind perception), people exert more top-down control on attention orienting. Although increasing an agent's physical human-likeness can enhance mind perception, it could have negative consequences on top-down control of social attention when a gazer's physical appearance is categorically ambiguous (i.e., difficult to categorize as human or nonhuman), as resolving this ambiguity would require using cognitive resources that otherwise could be used to top-down control attention orienting. To examine this question, we used mouse-tracking to explore if categorically ambiguous agents are associated with increased processing costs (Experiment 1), whether categorically ambiguous stimuli negatively impact top-down control of social attention (Experiment 2), and if resolving the conflict related to the agent's categorical ambiguity (using exposure) would restore top-down control to orient attention (Experiment 3). The findings suggest that categorically ambiguous stimuli are associated with cognitive conflict, which negatively impact the ability to exert top-down control on attentional orienting in a counterpredicitive gaze-cueing paradigm; this negative impact, however, is attenuated when being pre-exposed to the stimuli prior to the gaze-cueing task. Taken together, these findings suggest that manipulating physical human-likeness is a powerful way to affect mind perception in human-robot interaction (HRI) but has a diminishing returns effect on social attention when it is categorically ambiguous due to drainage of cognitive resources and impairment of top-down control.

Social attention across borders: A cross-cultural investigation of gaze cueing elicited by same- and other-ethnicity faces

The gaze-cueing effect is a robust phenomenon which illustrates how attention can be shaped by social factors. In four experiments, the present study explored the interaction between the ethnic membership of the participant and that of the face providing the gaze cue. Firstly, we aimed to further investigate the differential impact of White, Black, and Asian faces on the gaze-cueing effect in White individuals. Secondly, we aimed to explore, for the first time, the impact of faces belonging to different ethnicities on gaze cueing in Chinese participants. The results allowed to rule out alternative accounts and showed that White participants exhibit a gaze-cueing effect for White and Asian faces, but not for Black faces, consistent with previous studies. As regards Chinese participants, the overall findings suggested a stronger gaze-cueing effect for White faces than for Asian faces. The results are discussed with reference to differences in the perceived social status of the various groups, pointing to the need of taking into account different cultural contexts.

Early saccade planning cannot override oculomotor interference elicited by gaze and arrow distractors

Humans tend to perform reflexive saccades according to the eye-gaze direction of other individuals. Here, in two experiments, we tested whether preparing a saccade before the onset of a task-irrelevant averted-gaze stimulus can abolish this form of gaze-following behavior. At the beginning of each trial, participants received the instruction to prepare for a leftward or a rightward saccade. This was provided either on a trial-by-trial basis (Experiment 1) or was maintained constant within a whole block of trials (Experiment 2). Then, a central fixation spot changed in color, acting as a "go" signal to perform the saccade. Simultaneously with the go-signal onset, a task-irrelevant distractor face looked either leftwards or rightwards. In so doing, no temporal overlapping was likely to occur between saccade preparation and the presentation of the distractor. Arrows were also employed as non-social control stimuli. In both experiments - and regardless of the distractor type - saccadic latencies were smaller when both the instruction and the distractor conveyed the same spatial vector, rather than the opposite. Taken together, these results suggest that an early preparation of saccades is not sufficient to override the oculomotor interference effects elicited by both social and non-social distractors.