Abstract
Humans typically exhibit a tendency to follow the gaze of conspecifics, a social attention behaviour known as gaze cueing. Here, we addressed whether episodically learned social knowledge about the behaviours performed by the individual bearing the gaze can influence this phenomenon. In a learning phase, different faces were systematically associated with either positive or negative behaviours. The same faces were then used as stimuli in a gaze-cueing task. The results showed that faces associated with antisocial norm-violating behaviours triggered stronger gaze-cueing effects as compared to faces associated with sociable behaviours. Importantly, this was especially evident for participants who perceived the presented norm-violating behaviours as far more negative as compared to positive behaviours. These findings suggest that reflexive attentional responses can be affected by our appraisal of the valence of the behaviours of individuals around us.
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Notes
SOA is a crucial variable to sample attention allocation over time in spatial cueing tasks (see Chica et al. 2014). As for the gaze cueing paradigm, there is evidence suggesting that the magnitude of the gaze-cueing effect can be stronger at longer SOAs, a finding reported in both healthy individuals (e.g., Dalmaso et al. 2016; Driver et al. 1999; Frischen and Tipper 2006) and in clinical populations (e.g., Dalmaso et al. 2013). However, when social variables are manipulated, the effects exerted by these social manipulations on gaze cueing seem to be more evident at shorter SOAs (e.g., Dalmaso et al. 2014; Jones et al. 2010).
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This research was supported by MIUR (Futuro in Ricerca 2012, Grants RBFR12F0BD and RBFR128CR6).
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Handling Editor: Bruno Laeng (University of Oslo).
Reviewers: Anna Pecchinenda (Sapienza University of Rome) and Olga Chelnokova (University of Oslo).
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Carraro, L., Dalmaso, M., Castelli, L. et al. The appeal of the devil’s eye: social evaluation affects social attention. Cogn Process 18, 97–103 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-016-0785-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-016-0785-2