The eyes do not have it after all? Attention is not automatically biased towards faces and eyes

Relative saliency affects attentional capture and suppression of color and face singleton distractors: evidence from event-related potential studies

Prior research has yet to fully elucidate the impact of varying relative saliency between target and distractor on attentional capture and suppression, along with their underlying neural mechanisms, especially when social (e.g. face) and perceptual (e.g. color) information interchangeably serve as singleton targets or distractors, competing for attention in a search array. Here, we employed an additional singleton paradigm to investigate the effects of relative saliency on attentional capture (as assessed by N2pc) and suppression (as assessed by PD) of color or face singleton distractors in a visual search task by recording event-related potentials. We found that face singleton distractors with higher relative saliency induced stronger attentional processing. Furthermore, enhancing the physical salience of colors using a bold color ring could enhance attentional processing toward color singleton distractors. Reducing the physical salience of facial stimuli by blurring weakened attentional processing toward face singleton distractors; however, blurring enhanced attentional processing toward color singleton distractors because of the change in relative saliency. In conclusion, the attentional processes of singleton distractors are affected by their relative saliency to singleton targets, with higher relative saliency of singleton distractors resulting in stronger attentional capture and suppression; faces, however, exhibit some specificity in attentional capture and suppression due to high social saliency.

Maternal attachment security modulates the relationship between vulnerability to anxiety and attentional bias to threat in healthy children

This study aimed to investigate whether attentional bias to threat, commonly observed in clinically anxious children, also manifests in healthy children, potentially aiding the early detection of at-risk individuals. Additionally, it sought to explore the moderating role of parent-child attachment security on the association between vulnerability factors (anxiety sensitivity, intolerance of uncertainty, perseverative cognitions) as indicators of vulnerability to anxiety, and attentional bias towards threat in healthy children. A total of 95 children aged 8 to 12 years completed the Visual Search Task to assess attentional bias. Vulnerability to anxiety was measured using a composite score derived from the Childhood Anxiety Sensitivity Index, Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale for Children, and Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire. Parent-child attachment security was assessed using the Security Scale-Child Self-Report. Analyses revealed that higher vulnerability to anxiety was associated with faster detection of anger-related stimuli compared to neutral ones, and this association was further influenced by high maternal security. These findings in healthy children suggest an interaction between specific factors related to anxiety vulnerability and the security of the mother-child relationship, leading to cognitive patterns resembling those seen in clinically anxious individuals. These results hold promise for early identification of children at risk of developing anxiety disorders.

Faces do not guide attention in an object-based facilitation manner

Numerous studies on face processing have revealed their special ability to affect attention, but relatively little research has been done on how faces guide spatial attention allocation. To enrich this field, this study resorted to the object-based attention (OBA) effect in a modified double-rectangle paradigm where the rectangles were replaced with human faces and mosaic patterns (non-face objects). Experiment 1 replicated the typical OBA effect in the non-face objects, but this effect was absent in Asian and Caucasian faces. Experiment 2 removed the eye region from Asian faces, but still found no object-based facilitation in the faces without eyes. In Experiment 3, the OBA effect was also observed for faces when the faces disappear a short period before the responses. Overall, these results revealed that when two faces are presented together, they do not exert object-based facilitation regardless of their facial features such as race and the presence of eyes. We argue that the lack of a typical OBA effect is due to the filtering cost induced by the entire face content. This cost slows down the response when attention shifts within a face and results in the absence of object-based facilitation.

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.

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.

Infrequent faces bias social attention differently in manual and oculomotor measures

Although attention is thought to be spontaneously biased by social cues like faces and eyes, recent data have demonstrated that when extraneous content, context, and task factors are controlled, attentional biasing is abolished in manual responses while still occurring sparingly in oculomotor measures. Here, we investigated how social attentional biasing was affected by face novelty by measuring responses to frequently presented (i.e., those with lower novelty) and infrequently presented (i.e., those with higher novelty) face identities. Using a dot-probe task, participants viewed either the same face and house identity that was frequently presented on half of the trials or sixteen different face and house identities that were infrequently presented on the other half of the trials. A response target occurred with equal probability at the previous location of the eyes or mouth of the face or the top or bottom of the house. Experiment 1 measured manual responses to the target while participants maintained central fixation. Experiment 2 additionally measured participants' natural oculomotor behaviour when their eye movements were not restricted. Across both experiments, no evidence of social attentional biasing was found in manual data. However, in Experiment 2, there was a reliable oculomotor bias towards the eyes of infrequently presented upright faces. Together, these findings suggest that face novelty does not facilitate manual measures of social attention, but it appears to promote spontaneous oculomotor biasing towards the eyes of infrequently presented novel faces.

Altered social cognition in a community sample of women with disordered eating behaviours: a multi-method approach

Prior work suggests that individuals with an eating disorder demonstrate task-based and overall differences in sociocognitive functioning. However, the majority of studies assessed specifically anorexia nervosa and often employed a single experimental paradigm, providing a piecemeal understanding of the applicability of various lab tasks in denoting meaningful differences across diverse individuals. The current study was designed to address these outstanding issues. Participants were undergraduate females who self-identified as having an official (n = 18) eating disorder diagnosis or disordered eating behaviours with no diagnosis (n = 18), along with a control group (n = 32). Participants completed three social tasks of increasing complexity with different outcome measures, namely a gaze cueing task, passive video-watching using eyetracking, and a task to measure preferred social distance. Results diverged as a function of group across tasks; only the control group produced typical social attention effects, the disordered eating group looked significantly more at faces, and the eating disorder group demonstrated a significantly larger preferred social distance. These results suggest variations in task efficacy and demonstrate that altered sociocognitive functioning extends beyond official eating disorder diagnosis.

Do eyes and arrows elicit automatic orienting? Three mutually exclusive hypotheses and a test

Eyes in a schematic face and arrows presented at fixation can each cue an upcoming lateralized target such that responses to the target are faster to a valid than an invalid cue (sometimes claimed to reflect "automatic" orienting). One test of an automatic process concerns the extent to which it can be interfered with by another process. The present experiment investigates the ability of eyes and arrows to cue an upcoming target when both cues are present at the same time. On some trials they are congruent (both cues signal the same direction); on other trials they are incongruent (the two cues signal opposite directions). When the cues are congruent a valid cue produced faster response times than an invalid cue. In the incongruent case arrows are resistant to interference from eyes, whereas an incongruent arrow eliminates a cueing effect for eyes. The discussion elaborates briefly on the theoretical implications.

Attention capture by trains and faces in children with and without autism spectrum disorder

This study examined involuntary capture of attention, overt attention, and stimulus valence and arousal ratings, all factors that can contribute to potential attentional biases to face and train objects in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In the visual domain, faces are particularly captivating, and are thought to have a ‘special status’ in the attentional system. Research suggests that similar attentional biases may exist for other objects of expertise (e.g. birds for bird experts), providing support for the role of exposure in attention prioritization. Autistic individuals often have circumscribed interests around certain classes of objects, such as trains, that are related to vehicles and mechanical systems. This research aimed to determine whether this propensity in autistic individuals leads to stronger attention capture by trains, and perhaps weaker attention capture by faces, than what would be expected in non-autistic children. In Experiment 1, autistic children (6–14 years old) and age- and IQ-matched non-autistic children performed a visual search task where they manually indicated whether a target butterfly appeared amongst an array of face, train, and neutral distractors while their eye-movements were tracked. Autistic children were no less susceptible to attention capture by faces than non-autistic children. Overall, for both groups, trains captured attention more strongly than face stimuli and, trains had a larger effect on overt attention to the target stimuli, relative to face distractors. In Experiment 2, a new group of children (autistic and non-autistic) rated train stimuli as more interesting and exciting than the face stimuli, with no differences between groups. These results suggest that: (1) other objects (trains) can capture attention in a similar manner as faces, in both autistic and non-autistic children (2) attention capture is driven partly by voluntary attentional processes related to personal interest or affective responses to the stimuli.

How does gaze to faces support face-to-face interaction? A review and perspective

Gaze-where one looks, how long, and when-plays an essential part in human social behavior. While many aspects of social gaze have been reviewed, there is no comprehensive review or theoretical framework that describes how gaze to faces supports face-to-face interaction. In this review, I address the following questions: (1) When does gaze need to be allocated to a particular region of a face in order to provide the relevant information for successful interaction; (2) How do humans look at other people, and faces in particular, regardless of whether gaze needs to be directed at a particular region to acquire the relevant visual information; (3) How does gaze support the regulation of interaction? The work reviewed spans psychophysical research, observational research, and eye-tracking research in both lab-based and interactive contexts. Based on the literature overview, I sketch a framework for future research based on dynamic systems theory. The framework holds that gaze should be investigated in relation to sub-states of the interaction, encompassing sub-states of the interactors, the content of the interaction as well as the interactive context. The relevant sub-states for understanding gaze in interaction vary over different timescales from microgenesis to ontogenesis and phylogenesis. The framework has important implications for vision science, psychopathology, developmental science, and social robotics.

Task-related gaze control in human crowd navigation

Human crowds provide an interesting case for research on the perception of people. In this study, we investigate how visual information is acquired for (1) navigating human crowds and (2) seeking out social affordances in crowds by studying gaze behavior during human crowd navigation under different task instructions. Observers (n = 11) wore head-mounted eye-tracking glasses and walked two rounds through hallways containing walking crowds (n = 38) and static objects. For round one, observers were instructed to avoid collisions. For round two, observers furthermore had to indicate with a button press whether oncoming people made eye contact. Task performance (walking speed, absence of collisions) was similar across rounds. Fixation durations indicated that heads, bodies, objects, and walls maintained gaze comparably long. Only crowds in the distance maintained gaze relatively longer. We find no compelling evidence that human bodies and heads hold one's gaze more than objects while navigating crowds. When eye contact was assessed, heads were fixated more often and for a total longer duration, which came at the cost of looking at bodies. We conclude that gaze behavior in crowd navigation is task-dependent, and that not every fixation is strictly necessary for navigating crowds. When explicitly tasked with seeking out potential social affordances, gaze is modulated as a result. We discuss our findings in the light of current theories and models of gaze behavior. Furthermore, we show that in a head-mounted eye-tracking study, a large degree of experimental control can be maintained while many degrees of freedom on the side of the observer remain.

Reading and Misleading: Changes in Head and Eye Movements Reveal Attentional Orienting in a Social Context

Social attention describes how observers orient to social information and exhibit behaviors such as gaze following. These behaviors are examples of how attentional orienting may differ when in the presence of other people, although they have typically been studied without actual social presence. In the present study we ask whether orienting, as measured by head and eye movements, will change when participants are trying to mislead or hide their attention from a bystander. In two experiments, observers performed a preference task while being video-recorded, and subsequent participants were asked to guess the response of the participant based on a video of the head and upper body. In a second condition, observers were told to try to mislead the “guesser”. The results showed that participants’ preference responses could be guessed from videos of the head and, critically, that participants spontaneously changed their orienting behavior in order to mislead by reducing the rate at which they made large head movements. Masking the eyes with sunglasses suggested that head movements were most important in our setup. This indicates that head and eye movements can be used flexibly according to the socio-communicative context.

Contextually-Based Social Attention Diverges across Covert and Overt Measures

Humans spontaneously attend to social cues like faces and eyes. However, recent data show that this behavior is significantly weakened when visual content, such as luminance and configuration of internal features, as well as visual context, such as background and facial expression, are controlled. Here, we investigated attentional biasing elicited in response to information presented within appropriate background contexts. Using a dot-probe task, participants were presented with a face-house cue pair, with a person sitting in a room and a house positioned within a picture hanging on a wall. A response target occurred at the previous location of the eyes, mouth, top of the house, or bottom of the house. Experiment 1 measured covert attention by assessing manual responses while participants maintained central fixation. Experiment 2 measured overt attention by assessing eye movements using an eye tracker. The data from both experiments indicated no evidence of spontaneous attentional biasing towards faces or facial features in manual responses; however, an infrequent, though reliable, overt bias towards the eyes of faces emerged. Together, these findings suggest that contextually-based social information does not determine spontaneous social attentional biasing in manual measures, although it may act to facilitate oculomotor behavior.