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

Not to follow because of distrust: perceived trust modulates the gaze cueing effect

In social life, people spontaneously form stable trustworthiness impressions from faces. However, the precise role of extracting trustworthiness information remains unclear. This study aims to elucidate whether discerning facial trustworthiness influences social interactions. Specifically, it explores the gaze cueing effect (GCE), wherein individuals exhibit quicker responses to targets appearing in the direction of gaze compared to other locations. Given conflicting perspectives in existing literature regarding the potential modulation of trustworthiness on the GCE, two plausible hypotheses are proposed to explain divergent result patterns. The reflexive hypothesis posits that the GCE operates automatically. In contrast, the flexible hypothesis underscores the potential modulatory role of trustworthiness in the GCE. To provide a comprehensive understanding of whether trustworthiness modulates the GCE, we employed face stimuli incorporating trustworthiness information within Posner' s cue-target task. The findings of Experiment 1 revealed that the perception of trustworthiness indeed influenced the GCE. Specifically, when facial stimuli were perceived as trustworthy, they elicited a more pronounced GCE compared to untrustworthy stimuli. This modulation effect was replicated using a different stimulus set in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, we employed the same stimuli as in Experiment 2, setting the trustworthiness information to baseline as a control experiment. The results demonstrated that the trustworthiness modulation effect disappeared, indicating its specificity to the trustworthiness attribute of the stimuli rather than other characteristics. Collectively, these findings lend support to the flexible hypothesis, highlighting that the extraction of trustworthiness information plays a pivotal role in modulating the GCE, consequently influencing social interactions.

Flexible Cultural Learning Through Action Coordination

The cultural transmission of technical know-how has proven vital to the success of our species. The broad diversity of learning contexts and social configurations, as well as the various kinds of coordinated interactions they involve, speaks to our capacity to flexibly adapt to and succeed in transmitting vital knowledge in various learning contexts. Although often recognized by ethnographers, the flexibility of cultural learning has so far received little attention in terms of cognitive mechanisms. We argue that a key feature of the flexibility of cultural learning is that both the models and learners recruit cognitive mechanisms of action coordination to modulate their behavior contingently on the behavior of their partner, generating a process of mutual adaptation supporting the successful transmission of technical skills in diverse and fluctuating learning environments. We propose that the study of cultural learning would benefit from the experimental methods, results, and insights of joint-action research and, complementarily, that the field of joint-action research could expand its scope by integrating a learning and cultural dimension. Bringing these two fields of research together promises to enrich our understanding of cultural learning, its contextual flexibility, and joint action coordination.

Guilt-inducing interaction with others modulates subsequent attentional orienting via their gaze

Gaze direction can trigger social attentional orientation, characterised by a speeded reaction time in detecting targets appearing in a gazed-at location compared with those appearing in other locations. This is called the 'gaze-cueing effect' (GCE). Here, we investigated whether a feeling of guilt established through prior interaction with a cueing face could modulate the gaze-cueing effect. Participants first completed a guilt-induction task using a modified dot-estimation paradigm to associate the feeling of guilt with a specific face, after which the face that had established the binding relationship was used as the stimulus in a gaze-cueing task. The results showed that guilt-directed faces and control faces induce equal magnitudes of gaze-cueing effect in 200 ms of stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), while guilt-directed faces induce a smaller gaze-cueing effect than control faces in 700 ms SOA. These findings provide preliminary evidence that guilt may modulate social attention triggered by eye gaze at a later stage of processing but not in the earlier stages.

Evidence for a two-step model of social group influence

Social group influence plays an important role in societally relevant phenomena such as rioting and mass panic. One way through which groups influence individuals is by directing their gaze. Evidence that gaze following increases with group size has typically been explained in terms of strategic processes. Here, we tested the role of reflexive processes. In an ecologically valid virtual reality task, we found that participants were more likely to follow the group’s gaze when more people looked, even though they knew the group provided no relevant information. Interestingly, participants also sometimes changed their mind after starting to follow the gaze of the group, indicating that automatic imitation can be overruled by strategic processes. This suggests that social group influence is best explained by a two-step model in which bottom-up imitative processes first elicit a reflexive tendency to imitate, before top-down strategic processes determine whether to execute or inhibit this reflex.

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Groups influence human behavior in two stages

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First, groups elicit a reflexive tendency to imitate

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Second, strategic processes decide to execute or inhibit this reflex

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Social group conformity may be more automatic than previously thought