Combining social cues in attention: Looking at gaze, head, and pointing cues

Abstract

Social cues bias covert spatial attention. In most previous work the impact of different social cues, such as the gaze, head, and pointing cue, has been investigated using separated cues or making one cue explicitly task relevant in response-interference tasks. In the present study we created a novel cartoon figure in which unpredictive gaze and head and pointing cues could be combined to study their impact on spatial attention. In Experiment 1, gaze and pointing cues were either presented alone or together. When both cues were present, they were always directed to the same location. In Experiment 2, gaze and pointing cues were either directed to the same location (aligned) or directed to different locations (conflicted). Experiment 3 was like Experiment 2, except that the pointing cue was tested alongside a head-direction cue. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the effect of the gaze cue was reliably smaller than the pointing cue, and an aligned gaze cue did not have an additive benefit for performance. In Experiments 2 and 3, performance was determined by the pointing cue, regardless of where they eyes were looking, or the head was directed. The present results demonstrated a strong dominance of the pointing cue over the other cues. The child-friendly stimuli present a versatile way to study the impact of the combination of social cues, which may further benefit developmental research in social attention, and research in populations whose members might have atypical social attention.

Reversing the reversed congruency effect: directional salience overrides social significance in a spatial Stroop task

“…Thus, even if participants responded to the gaze direction of the head stimuli, head orientation overrode the eyes region, modulating the spatial judgments. This explanation supports the idea that the head exerts its directional salience rather than social information ( Burton et al, 2009 ; Hermens et al, 2017 ; Lu & van Zoest, 2023 ).…”

“…Nevertheless, given that head orientation can function as a social cue (Emery, 2000;Langton & Bruce, 1999;Langton et al, 2000), it is surprising that the head, like gaze cues, a social stimulus, exhibits the typical SSE in the present study. However, this result is explainable if considering the directional salience of the head stimuli (Burton et al, 2009;Hermens et al, 2017;Lu & van Zoest, 2023). Head orientation has a more salient facial outline than eye gaze, which should be advantageous for identifying its direction even when in the periphery.…”

“…Although the heads play a similar role to eye gaze in establishing joint attention ( Emery, 2000 ; Langton & Bruce, 1999 ; Langton et al, 2000 ), head stimuli differ from gaze stimuli in some respects, such as directional saliency; head directions are obviously more salient than gaze directions ( Burton et al, 2009 ; Hermens et al, 2017 ; Lu & van Zoest, 2023 ). Highly salient features of the head should be robust and resistant to noise, even when in the periphery.…”

“…Heads are radically different from the gaze in terms of their saliency. Namely, changes in head orientation drastically alter the appearance of the face outline from the observers ( Burton et al, 2009 ; Hermens et al, 2017 ; Lu & van Zoest, 2023 ), whereas changes in gaze direction have little effect on the facial outline because the gaze direction is defined by subtle morphological features within the eyes (e.g., the relative position of the dark iris/pupils and white sclera, Fan et al, 2018 ; Tanaka et al, 2023b ). In Hermens et al's.…”