Contextually-Based Social Attention Diverges across Covert and Overt Measures

Pereira, Effie J.; Birmingham, Elina; Ristic, Jelena

doi:10.3390/vision3020029

Cited by 8 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 98 publications

(134 reference statements)

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“…In sum, our findings and that of others [29,30] suggest that factors such as stimulus, task parameters, and valence might play a stronger role in biasing attention to social stimuli than previously thought, particularly in children. Controversially, our findings suggest that it is not accurate to say that faces generally/automatically capture the attentional system of humans disproportionately more so than other nonsocial stimuli.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 65%

“…Face stimuli guide eye-movements away from targets [5] and they slow search performance when task-irrelevant [7]. Furthermore, the manual detection of a target is faster when it appears at the location of a face relative to a non-face object location [28, although, see 29,30], suggesting that participants' attention was spontaneously biased to the face region, thereby facilitating detection of targets subsequently appearing there. Similar results were found in non-autistic children, who demonstrate slower search performance in the presence of task-irrelevant upright [8] and inverted [31] faces.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2021

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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.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 65%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2021

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“…Pereira and colleagues found across multiple experiments that faces did not reliably draw attention to their cued location, as indexed by participants' reaction time. In a follow-up Bayesian analysis on one of their experiments, the authors found evidence for the null hypothesis of no reaction time differences emerging for targets appearing at locations that were cued by faces or houses (Pereira et al, 2019). While a different task was used in these studies, the authors' findings closely align with ours: faces are not reliably capturing attention and impairing the performance on an unrelated cognitive task.…”

Section: General Discussion General Discussionsupporting

confidence: 62%

Faces Do Not Attract More Attention Than Non-Social Distractors in the Stroop Task

Henschel

Bargel

Cross

2021

Collabra: Psychology

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As robots begin to receive citizenship, are treated as beloved pets, and given a place at Japanese family tables, it is becoming clear that these machines are taking on increasingly social roles. While human-robot interaction research relies heavily on self-report measures for assessing people’s perception of robots, a distinct lack of robust cognitive and behavioural measures to gauge the scope and limits of social motivation towards artificial agents exists. Here we adapted Conty and colleagues’ (2010) social version of the classic Stroop paradigm, in which we showed four kinds of distractor images above incongruent and neutral words: human faces, robot faces, object faces (for example, a cloud with facial features) and flowers (control). We predicted that social stimuli, like human faces, would be extremely salient and draw attention away from the to-be-processed words. A repeated-measures ANOVA indicated that the task worked (the Stroop effect was observed), and a distractor-dependent enhancement of Stroop interference emerged. Planned contrasts indicated that specifically human faces presented above incongruent words significantly slowed participants’ reaction times. To investigate this small effect further, we conducted a second experiment (N=51) with a larger stimulus set. While the main effect of the incongruent condition slowing down participants’ reaction time replicated, we did not observe an interaction effect of the social distractors (human faces) drawing more attention than the other distractor types. We question the suitability of this task as a robust measure for social motivation and discuss our findings in the light of recent conflicting results in the social attentional capture literature.

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“…Bayesian analysis on one of their experiments, the authors found evidence for the null hypothesis of no reaction time differences emerging for targets appearing at locations that were cued by faces or houses (Pereira et al, 2019). While a different task was used in these studies, the authors' findings closely align with ours: faces are not reliably capturing attention and impairing the performance on an unrelated cognitive task.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 59%

Faces do not attract more attention than non-social distractors in the Stroop task

Henschel¹,

Bargel²,

Cross³

2020

Preprint

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As robots begin to receive citizenship, be treated as beloved pets, and are given a place at Japanese family tables, it is becoming clear that these machines are taking on increasingly social roles. While human robot interaction research relies heavily on self-report measures for assessing people’s perception of robots, a distinct lack of robust cognitive and behavioural measures to gage the scope and limits of social motivation towards artificial agents exists. Here we adapted Conty and colleagues’ (2010) social version of the classic Stroop paradigm, in which we showed four kinds of distractor images above incongruent and neutral words: human faces, robot faces, object faces (for example, a cloud with facial features) and flowers (control). We predicted that social stimuli, like human faces, would be extremely salient and draw attention away from the to-be-processed words. A repeated-measures ANOVA indicated that the task worked (the Stroop effect was observed), and a distractor-dependent enhancement of Stroop interference emerged. Planned contrasts indicated that specifically human faces presented above incongruent words significantly slowed participants’ reaction times. To investigate this small effect further, we conducted a second study (N=51) with a larger stimulus set. While the main effect of the incongruent condition slowing down the reaction time of the participants replicated, we did not observe an interaction effect of the social distractors (human faces) drawing more attention than the other distractor types. We question the suitability of this task as a robust measure for social motivation and discuss our findings in the light of the conflicting results of Hietanen and colleagues (2016).

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Contextually-Based Social Attention Diverges across Covert and Overt Measures

Cited by 8 publications

References 98 publications

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

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

Faces Do Not Attract More Attention Than Non-Social Distractors in the Stroop Task

Faces do not attract more attention than non-social distractors in the Stroop task

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