Emotion Unchained: Facial Expression Modulates Gaze Cueing under Cognitive Load

Abstract

Direction of eye gaze cues spatial attention, and typically this cueing effect is not modulated by the expression of a face unless top-down processes are explicitly or implicitly involved. To investigate the role of cognitive control on gaze cueing by emotional faces, participants performed a gaze cueing task with happy, angry, or neutral faces under high (i.e., counting backward by 7) or low cognitive load (i.e., counting forward by 2). Results show that high cognitive load enhances gaze cueing effects for angry facial expressions. In addition, cognitive load reduces gaze cueing for neutral faces, whereas happy facial expressions and gaze affected object preferences regardless of load. This evidence clearly indicates a differential role of cognitive control in processing gaze direction and facial expression, suggesting that under typical conditions, when we shift attention based on social cues from another person, cognitive control processes are used to reduce interference from emotional information.

Conflict Tasks of Different Types Divergently Affect the Attentional Processing of Gaze and Arrow

“…For example, some studies have recently shown that the gaze-induced orienting effect of a target is not modulated by dual-task load, indicating that the process of coding gaze cues is highly reflexive ( Hayward & Ristic, 2013 ; Law, Langton, & Logie, 2010 ). Nevertheless, other studies have demonstrated that a secondary, resource-consuming task reduced the gaze-cuing effects, thus challenging the view that attentional orientations induced by gaze cues meet the reflexive criterion of resisting capacity limitation ( Bobak & Langton, 2015 ; Pecchinenda & Petrucci, 2016 ).…”

Large lateralized EDAN‐like brain potentials in a gaze‐shift detection task

“…A further aim of our study was to investigate whether the invariant emotional expression of the face on the screen would affect the EDAN. Some behavioral studies have reported an enhanced gaze‐orienting effect for angry (Holmes, Richards, & Green, ; Pecchinenda & Petrucci, ; but see Hori et al, ) and, in particular, fearful (e.g., Graham et al, ; Mathews, Fox, Yiend, & Calder, ) expressions, possibly reflecting the evolutionary advantage of rapidly attending to danger (Neath et al, ; Putman, Hermans, & van Honk, ). However, the few studies that have investigated modulations of the EDAN or ADAN by emotional expression (Holmes et al, ; Lassalle & Itier, ; also listed in Table ) did not find such effects.…”

“…Gaze changes may be of special significance when they occur in faces expressing emotions. Indeed, in some studies, the behavioral gaze‐orienting effect appears to be enhanced for fearful and angry expressions (e.g., Graham, Kelland Friesen, Fichtenholtz, & LaBar, ; Neath, Nilsen, Gittsovich, & Itier, ; Pecchinenda & Petrucci, ), although such modulations have not always been found (e.g., Hietanen & Leppänen, ; Pletti, Dalmaso, Sarlo, & Galfano, ). Therefore, it remains unclear whether and under which circumstances gaze‐cued attention shifts are modulated by facial expressions.…”

Differences in Working-Memory Capacity Modulate Top-down Control of Social Attention

“…After the gaze-following task was completed (total of 240 trials), individual WMC was measured using the Operation Span (Ospan), Symmetry Span (Sspan) and Reading Span (Rspan); see [8,23]. In the Ospan, participants alternated between being presented with a mathematical operation they had to judge the validity of, and being presented with a to-be recalled letter.…”

“…The results did not show the expected linear relationship between the gazer's humanness and the extent of bottom-up attentional orienting, but show an inverted U-shaped pattern instead: participants successfully managed to suppress reflexive shifts of attention to the cued (but unlikely) location in response to gaze cues sent by the 100% human and 100% robot agents (i.e., negative difference scores between invalid and valid trials), but were unable to do so for the other agents (i.e., positive difference scores between invalid and valid trials), with the strongest bottom-up effect for the 60% human morph; see Figure 2. Since exerting top-down control on attentional orienting relies on cognitive resources [23], the results suggest that processing agents with mixed human and robot characteristics drains cognitive resources, which are then not available for the top-down modulated suppression of reflexive gaze following to unlikely target locations.…”