The politics of attention contextualized: gaze but not arrow cuing of attention is moderated by political temperament

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.

Individual differences in gaze-cuing effect are associated with facial emotion recognition and social conformity

Spontaneous gaze following and the concomitant joint attention enable us to share representations of the world with others, which forms a foundation of a broad range of social cognitive processes. Although this form of social orienting has long been suggested as a critical starting point for the development of social and communicative behavior, there is limited evidence directly linking it to higher-level social cognitive processes among healthy adults. Here, using a gaze-cuing paradigm, we examined whether individual differences in gaze following tendency predict higher-order social cognition and behavior among healthy adults. We found that individuals who showed greater gaze-cuing effect performed better in recognizing others' emotion and had greater tendency to conform with group opinion. These findings provide empirical evidence supporting the fundamental role of low-level socio-attentional processes in human sociality.

Gazing left, gazing right: exploring a spatial bias in social attention

Faces oriented rightwards are sometimes perceived as more dominant than faces oriented leftwards. In this study, we explored whether faces oriented rightwards can also elicit increased attentional orienting. Participants completed a discrimination task in which they were asked to discriminate, by means of a keypress, a peripheral target. At the same time, a task-irrelevant face oriented leftwards or rightwards appeared at the centre of the screen. The results showed that, while for faces oriented rightwards targets appearing on the right were responded to faster as compared to targets appearing on the left, for faces oriented leftwards no differences emerged between left and right targets. Furthermore, we also found a negative correlation between the magnitude of the orienting response elicited by the faces oriented leftwards and the level of conservatism of the participants. Overall, these findings provide evidence for the existence of a spatial bias reflected in social orienting.

Dining with liberals and conservatives: The social underpinnings of food neophobia

Although food and politics seem to be distant domains, socio-political ideology and food neophobia (i.e., reluctance to eat unfamiliar food) may be related. Conservatives’ high threat sensitivity and the inherently threatening nature of novel foods (the existential explanation), along with conservatives’ negative attitudes toward minority outgroups (e.g., foreigners) and the role of the latter in introducing novel foods to a culture (the social explanation), led us to expect that socio-political ideology would predict food neophobia over and above their common roots. Across two correlational and two experimental studies (N = 627), socio-political ideology emerged as a strong predictor of food neophobia. In addition, the findings did not support the existential explanation, while confirming the social explanation of the ideology–food neophobia link: Conservatives seem more neophobic than liberals not because of their higher threat sensitivity but rather because they hold more negative attitudes toward foreigners who are associated with those foods.

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.

Left Threatened by Right: Political Intergroup Bias in the Contemporary Italian Context

Using different evaluation targets (i.e., politicians' pictures, ideological words, items referring to features attributed to political ingroup/outgroup) we characterized the intergroup bias among political groups in the Italian context (Study 1-2-3) and tested a model that may account for the bias itself (Study 3). For all evaluation targets, left-wing participants - compared to right-wing participants - showed a greater intergroup bias, expressing more negative emotions toward the outgroup. The process was influenced by a greater perceived threat of the outgroup. Conversely, right-wing participants expressed the bias only when presented with ideological words. Our results provide a detailed description of how intergroup bias in Italy is differently expressed by the two ideological groups depending on the targets used to represent the political counterpart. Moreover, the results show that the stronger bias expressed by left-wing participants is driven by perceived threat of the outgroup.

Perceiving crowd attention: Gaze following in human crowds with conflicting cues

People automatically redirect their visual attention by following others' gaze orientation, a phenomenon called "gaze following." This is an evolutionarily generated socio-cognitive process that provides people with information about their environments. Often, however, people in crowds can have rather different gaze orientations. This study investigated how gaze following occurs in situations with many conflicting gazes. In two experiments, we modified the gaze cueing paradigm to use a crowd rather than a single individual. Specifically, participants were presented with a group of human avatars with differing gaze orientations, and the target appeared randomly on the left or right side of a display. We found that (a) when a marked difference existed in the number of avatars with divergent gaze orientations, participants automatically followed the majority's gaze orientation, and (b) the strongest gaze cue effect occurred when all gazes shared the same orientation, with the response superiority of the majority's oriented location monotonically diminishing with the number of gazes with divergent orientations. These findings suggested that the majority rule plays a role in gaze following behavior when individuals are confronted with conflicting multigaze scenes, and that an increasing subgroup size appears to enlarge the strength of the gaze cueing effect.

The neural basis of intergroup threat effect on social attention

Previous gaze-cuing studies found that intergroup threat is one of the modulators of gaze cuing. These findings indicate that intergroup threat would gate social attention by activating a network resembling that is thought to be involved in drawing or/and holding attention. The present study tested this hypothesis using a gaze-cuing task in which a particular in-group participants observed threatening out-group and nonthreatening out-group gazes, while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. As expected, greater gaze cuing effect only emerged for threatening out-group when the in-group participants only felt inergroup threat from that out-group. Behaviorally, we found intergroup threatening out-group gazes did not draw attention faster than nonthreatening in-group gazes does. However, participants took more time to suppress the influence of the gaze direction of threatening out-group gazes, compared to nonthreatening in-group gazes, in the incongruent condition, which means intergroup threatening gaze holds attention longer than nonthreatening gaze does. Imaging results demonstrated that threatening cues recruited a fronto-parietal network, previously implicated in holding attention and execution functions. Our results, therefore, suggest that the mechanisms underpinning gaze cuing evolved to be sensitive to intergroup threatening stimuli, possibly because it is hard to disengage from such intergroup threatening cues once they are detected.

Fortunes and misfortunes of political leaders reflected in the eyes of their electors

Gaze-following is a pivotal social behaviour that, although largely automatic, is permeable to high-order variables like political affiliation. A few years ago we reported that the gaze of Italian right-wing voters was selectively captured by the gaze of their leader Silvio Berlusconi. This effect was particularly evident in voters who saw themselves as similar to Berlusconi. Two years later, we were able to run the present follow-up study because Berlusconi's popularity had drastically dropped due to sex and political scandals, and he resigned from office. In a representative subsample of our original group, we investigated whether perceived similarity and gaze-following reflected Berlusconi's loss in popularity. We were also able to test the same hypothesis in an independent group of right-wing voters when their leader, Renata Polverini, resigned as Governor of 'Regione Lazio' due to political scandals. Our results show that the leaders' fall in popularity paralleled the reduction of their gaze's attracting power, as well as the decrease in similarity perceived by their voters. The less similar right-wing voters felt to their leader, the less they followed his/her gaze. Thus, the present experimental findings suggest that gaze-following can be modulated by complex situational and dispositional factors such as leader's popularity and voter-leader perceived similarity.

The attracting power of the gaze of politicians is modulated by the personality and ideological attitude of their voters: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Observing someone rapidly moving their eyes induces reflexive shifts of overt and covert attention in the onlooker. Previous studies have shown that this process can be modulated by the onlooker's personality, as well as by the social features of the person depicted in the cued face. Here, we investigated whether an individual's preference for social dominance orientation, in-group perceived similarity (PS), and political affiliation of the cued-face modulated neural activity within specific nodes of the social attention network. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants were requested to perform a gaze-following task to investigate whether the directional gaze of various Italian political personages might influence the oculomotor behaviour of in-group or out-group voters. After scanning, we acquired measures of PS in personality traits with each political personage and preference for social dominance orientation. Behavioural data showed that higher gaze interference for in-group than out-group political personages was predicted by a higher preference for social hierarchy. Higher blood oxygenation level-dependent activity in incongruent vs. congruent conditions was found in areas associated with orienting to socially salient events and monitoring response conflict, namely the left frontal eye field, right supramarginal gyrus, mid-cingulate cortex and left anterior insula. Interestingly, higher ratings of PS with the in-group and less preference for social hierarchy predicted increased activity in the left frontal eye field during distracting gaze movements of in-group as compared with out-group political personages. Our results suggest that neural activity in the social orienting circuit is modulated by higher-order social dimensions, such as in-group PS and individual differences in ideological attitudes.

Space-based and object-centered gaze cuing of attention in right hemisphere-damaged patients

Gaze cuing of attention is a well established phenomenon consisting of the tendency to shift attention to the location signaled by the averted gaze of other individuals. Evidence suggests that such phenomenon might follow intrinsic object-centered features of the head containing the gaze cue. In the present exploratory study, we aimed to investigate whether such object-centered component is present in neuropsychological patients with a lesion involving the right hemisphere, which is known to play a critical role both in orienting of attention and in face processing. To this purpose, we used a modified gaze-cuing paradigm in which a centrally placed head with averted gaze was presented either in the standard upright position or rotated 90° clockwise or anti-clockwise. Afterward, a to-be-detected target was presented either in the right or in the left hemifield. The results showed that gaze cuing of attention was present only when the target appeared in the left visual hemifield and was not modulated by head orientation. This suggests that gaze cuing of attention in right hemisphere-damaged patients can operate within different frames of reference.