Emotionally meaningful targets enhance orienting triggered by a fearful gazing face

Abstract

Studies investigating the effect of emotional expression on spatial orienting to a gazed-at location have produced mixed results. The present study investigated the role of affective context in the integration of emotion processing and gaze-triggered orienting. In three experiments, a face gazed nonpredictively to the left or right, and then its expression became fearful or happy. Participants identified (Experiments 1 and 2) or detected (Experiment 3) a peripheral target presented 225 or 525 ms after the gaze cue onset. In Experiments 1 and 3 the targets were either threatening (a snarling dog) or nonthreatening (a smiling baby); in Experiment 2 the targets were neutral. With emotionally-valenced targets, the gaze-cuing effect was larger when the face was fearful compared to happy --but only with the longer cue-target interval. With neutral targets, there was no interaction between gaze and expression. Our results indicate that a meaningful context optimizes attentional integration of gaze and expression information. Keywords gaze direction; emotional expression; visual attention; affective context Dynamic information from faces provides us with a rich source of data about our environment. For example, shifts in other people's direction of gaze tell us where they are attending and can serve to direct our attention to potentially important objects or events that might be outside our current line of sight. Moreover, other people's facial expressions can indicate how they feel about the object or event to which they are attending. Being sensitive to these social visual cues should help us respond more efficiently to events when it is advantageous to react quickly.There is ample evidence that both gaze direction and emotional expression are processed quickly and automatically. Numerous attentional cuing studies have demonstrated that gaze direction cues can trigger an automatic shift of spatial attention to a gazed-at location (e.g., Driver et al., 1999;Friesen & Kingstone, 1998; for a review, see . This orienting effect occurs even when the gaze direction cues are not predictive of target location, and when the interval between the onset of the gaze cue and the NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptCogn Emot. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2012 January 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript onset of the target (stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA) is very short. Similarly, many studies have shown that facial emotional expression is processed quickly and automatically (e.g., Batty & Taylor, 2003;Eimer & Holmes, 2007; for a review, see Vuilleumier & Pourtois, 2007).An important outstanding question is when and how gaze direction information and facial expression information are integrated. It seems reasonable to expect that humans would have the ability to combine these two sources of information for optimal processing of social facial signals. In particular, seeing another person looking off to the side with a frightened expression should enhance one's natural tendency t...

Can gaze-cueing be helpful for detecting sound in autism spectrum disorder?

“…Error bars represent standard errors (SEMs). **p < 0.01. effects, which improve the effect of joint attention (Bayliss, Frischen, Fenske, & Tipper, 2007;Bayliss, Schuch, & Tipper, 2010;Bayliss & Tipper, 2005;Fichtenholtz, Hopfinger, Graham, Detwiler, & LaBar, 2007;Friesen, Halvorson, & Graham, 2011;Kuhn & Tipples, 2011). Knowing the focus of another person in a particular context provides important cues about the other person's interest in objects and events, and can elicit complementary effects in the observer (Sebanz, Bekkering, & Knoblich, 2006).…”

Atypical Gaze Following in Autism: A Comparison of Three Potential Mechanisms

“…However, typically developing children also did not show evidence of gaze emotion integration. Previous research demonstrating gaze emotion integration was conducted with adults using covert attention cueing paradigms (e.g., Bayliss et al 2010; Friesen et al 2011; Graham et al 2010; Heitanen and Leppänen 2003). Enhanced reflexive orienting to emotional cues may emerge later in development.…”

“…Because it is not always observed even in adulthood, some have asserted that emotion and gaze are processed independently early in visual processing (Heitanen and Leppänen 2003). Others have found evidence that the integration of gaze cues and emotion does occur, particularly when targets are emotionally salient (Bayliss et al 2010; Friesen et al 2011; Pecchinenda et al 2008). However, emotionally enhanced validity effects have also been observed with neutral targets (Graham et al2010; Tipples 2006).…”

“…Attention cueing paradigms typically present gaze cues in the context of neutral facial expressions. When gaze cues are paired with emotional expressions, typically developing adults may demonstrate more of a covert validity effect to fearful relative to happy or neutral gaze cues (Friesen et al 2011; Graham et al 2010; Pecchinenda et al 2008; Tipples 2006). However, emotional faces may not enhance reflexive orienting among individuals with autism: 11 high-functioning adolescents with ASCs differed from age and IQ matched controls in that they did not show an enhanced covert validity effect for fearful relative to neutral gaze cues (Uono et al 2009).…”

Emotion Unchained: Facial Expression Modulates Gaze Cueing under Cognitive Load

“…We used this task as loading working memory may not be sufficient to tax cognitive control resources [42] and because we have successfully used it to load cognitive control [43]. In addition, we chose to use a gaze cueing task with neutral and emotional expressions and an SOA of 250 ms typical of automatic effects [44] and because optimal SOA duration for gaze cueing effects has been reported to be <300 ms [10, 12, 25, 26, 35, 37], and gaze cueing effects disappear at longer SOA [26]; for a review see [45], which taps on the issue of gaze cueing effects having characteristics of automaticity. If emotional expression and gaze direction are processed automatically, they should not be affected by cognitive load when using parameters that allow investigating for automatic effects.…”