Examining the effects of social anxiety and other individual differences on gaze-directed attentional shifts

Talipski, Louisa A.; Bell, Emily; Goodhew, Stephanie Catherine; Dawel, Amy; Edwards, Mark

doi:10.1177/1747021820973954

Cited by 10 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 83 publications

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“…These findings confirm the amygdala's role in encoding the perceived threat level of faces, as well as the more general assumption that the amygdala encodes the relevance or significance of a stimulus to the observer [94]. These results suggest that individual anxiety levels may explain inconsistent findings from previous studies [95]. Straube and colleagues [83] investigated whether the amygdala is activated by a gaze in response to threat relevance or facial expression by testing its activation during the observation of neutral, happy and angry faces with either a direct or averted gaze.…”

Section: Conjoint Processing Of Emotional Expressions and Gaze Direct...supporting

confidence: 83%

The Neurobiological Correlates of Gaze Perception in Healthy Individuals and Neurologic Patients

et al. 2022

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The ability to adaptively follow conspecific eye movements is crucial for establishing shared attention and survival. Indeed, in humans, interacting with the gaze direction of others causes the reflexive orienting of attention and the faster object detection of the signaled spatial location. The behavioral evidence of this phenomenon is called gaze-cueing. Although this effect can be conceived as automatic and reflexive, gaze-cueing is often susceptible to context. In fact, gaze-cueing was shown to interact with other factors that characterize facial stimulus, such as the kind of cue that induces attention orienting (i.e., gaze or non-symbolic cues) or the emotional expression conveyed by the gaze cues. Here, we address neuroimaging evidence, investigating the neural bases of gaze-cueing and the perception of gaze direction and how contextual factors interact with the gaze shift of attention. Evidence from neuroimaging, as well as the fields of non-invasive brain stimulation and neurologic patients, highlights the involvement of the amygdala and the superior temporal lobe (especially the superior temporal sulcus (STS)) in gaze perception. However, in this review, we also emphasized the discrepancies of the attempts to characterize the distinct functional roles of the regions in the processing of gaze. Finally, we conclude by presenting the notion of invariant representation and underline its value as a conceptual framework for the future characterization of the perceptual processing of gaze within the STS.

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Section: Conjoint Processing Of Emotional Expressions and Gaze Direct...supporting

confidence: 83%

The Neurobiological Correlates of Gaze Perception in Healthy Individuals and Neurologic Patients

et al. 2022

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“…This finding also suggests that gaze cues trigger reflexive attention orienting. A recent study in a sample of 100 women reported that emotional facial expressions (i.e., angry and fearful faces) did not modulate gaze-triggered attention orienting ( Talipski et al, 2020 ). However, many studies have demonstrated that dynamic presentations of fearful ( Tipples, 2006 ; Uono et al, 2009a ; Lassalle and Itier, 2013 , 2015b ; Neath et al, 2013 ; McCrackin and Itier, 2018 ) and other emotional faces (angry: Lassalle and Itier, 2013 , 2015b ; Liu et al, 2019 ; Neath et al, 2013 ; surprised: Lassalle and Itier, 2013 , 2015b ; and happy: McCrackin and Itier, 2019 ) enhance attention orienting, compared with neutral faces.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similar to Lassalle and Itier (2015a) , McCrackin and Itier (2019) used the dynamic cues; they found that a stronger autistic trait (i.e., attention to detail) was associated with a weaker gaze-cueing effect from fearful and happy faces. In contrast, Talipski et al (2020) used static emotional faces which appeared prior to the change of their gaze direction; they did not find any emotional enhancement of the gaze-cueing effect, nor did they find any association between autistic traits and the gaze-cueing effect of emotional faces. Thus, the evidence is not conclusive regarding the association between the gaze-cueing effect and autistic traits in the general population.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

No Influence of Emotional Faces or Autistic Traits on Gaze-Cueing in General Population

et al. 2022

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The present study addressed the controversial issue of whether autistic traits in the general population are associated with the automatic and fundamental aspects of joint attention through eye gaze. Specifically, we examined whether the degree of autistic traits is associated with the magnitude of reflexive attention orienting in the direction of another’s eye gaze embedded in neutral and emotional (angry, fearful, and happy) faces. The cue stimuli changed gaze direction and facial expressions simultaneously. Participants were asked to detect a target that appeared at the left or right of the cue stimuli. The results revealed a robust gaze-cueing effect, such that the reaction time to the target was shorter under the gazed-at-target condition than under the non-gazed-at-target condition. However, emotional expressions did not modulate the gaze-cueing effect. Furthermore, individual differences in autistic traits and emotional characteristics (social anxiety, alexithymia, and emotional disturbances) did not influence the magnitude of the gaze-cueing effect. Although the ability to orient attention in the direction of another’s gaze is a fundamental function of social development, the gaze-cueing effect measured in a controlled experiment might not be an elaborate representation of the current social cognitive function, at least in typically developing adults.

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“…Following on from this, given gaze-cueing tasks are often used as a way to compare gaze following behavior between clinical or subclinical goups and healthy controls (e.g., see Dalmaso et al, 2013, 2015; Dawel et al, 2015; Langdon et al, 2017; Magnée et al, 2011; Marotta et al, 2018; Narison et al, 2020; Talipski et al, 2021; Uono, Sato, & Toichi, 2009; Wei et al, 2019), an important avenue for future research is to determine whether performance on gaze-cueing tasks is related to performance on well-established measures of social perception and real-life social functioning. Such an assessment would be particularly valuable given that social cognitive function is now firmly established as a critical predictor of mental health and well-being, and there is a need for objective, bias free measures to be developed (Henry et al, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual attentional orienting by eye gaze: A meta-analytic review of the gaze-cueing effect.

McKay¹,

Grainger²,

Coundouris³

et al. 2021

Psychological Bulletin

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Given limitations in the amount of visual information that a person can simultaneously process through to conscious perception, selective visual attention is necessary. Visual signals in the environment aid this selection process by triggering reflexive shifts of covert attention to locations of potential importance. One such signal appears to be others' eye gaze. Indeed, a gaze-cueing effect, whereby healthy adults respond faster to targets that are presented at locations cued rather than miscued by eye gaze has been consistently observed in the empirical literature. Critically though, the influences of task and cue features on this effect are not well understood. To address this gap, we report a meta-analytic integration of 423 gaze-cueing effects using a multilevel approach. A gaze-cueing effect emerged across all levels of the assessed task and cue features, indicating that others' eye gaze reliably directs observers' attention. We found that the magnitude of the gaze-cueing effect was moderated by whether direct gaze cues preceded directional gaze cues or not; the cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), whether participants had to detect, localize, or categorize targets; and the cue's facial expression. Whether or not the gaze cue remained on screen after the target appeared, and whether schematic faces, computer-generated faces, or images of real faces were used as cues, did not appear to reliably function as moderators. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed, particularly in relation to the social attention system. Public Significance StatementThe findings from this meta-analysis provide the strongest evidence to date that others' eye gaze is a powerful social cue that reliably directs observers to reflexively shift their own visual attention such that they engage in joint attention with the gazing person. The findings also provide insights into the specific circumstances in which this reflexive gaze-cued attention is enhanced.

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Examining the effects of social anxiety and other individual differences on gaze-directed attentional shifts

Cited by 10 publications

References 83 publications

The Neurobiological Correlates of Gaze Perception in Healthy Individuals and Neurologic Patients

The Neurobiological Correlates of Gaze Perception in Healthy Individuals and Neurologic Patients

No Influence of Emotional Faces or Autistic Traits on Gaze-Cueing in General Population

Visual attentional orienting by eye gaze: A meta-analytic review of the gaze-cueing effect.

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