Get real! Resolving the debate about equivalent social stimuli

Birmingham, Elina; Bischof, Walter F.; Kingstone, Alan

doi:10.1080/13506280902758044

Cited by 65 publications

(101 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…This is supported by data showing that social information is both prioritized and attended more frequently than nonsocial information when instead of a cuing task attention is measured using naturalistic looking behavior, i.e., using a procedure that does not require a specific response. That is, participants preferentially and rapidly fixate eyes and faces in complex images depicting everyday situations and attend to social cues more frequently overall relative to nonsocial cues (Birmingham, Bischof, & Kingstone, 2009;Boggia & Ristic, 2014;Kuhn, Tatler, & Cole, 2009). While not specifically indicating that differences in spatial orienting may exist between social and nonsocial cues, this body of evidence supports the idea that social and nonsocial information might be utilized differently in life, and further indicates that social information is prioritized over nonsocial information in complex everyday environments.…”

Section: Orienting To Social and Nonsocial Cuessupporting

confidence: 50%

Exposing the cuing task: the case of gaze and arrow cues

Hayward

Ristic

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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The prevailing theoretical accounts of social cognitive processes propose that attention is preferentially engaged by social information. However, empirical investigations report virtually indistinguishable attention effects for social (e.g., gaze) and nonsocial (e.g., arrow) stimuli when a cuing task is used. Here, we show that this discrepancy between theory and data reflects a difference in how the extraneous processes induced by the cuing task's parameters (i.e., tonic alertness and voluntary temporal preparation) modulate cuespecific attentional effects. Overall, we found that tonic alertness and voluntary temporal preparation interacted within the cuing task, resulting in underadditive magnitudes of spatial orienting and superadditive magnitudes of the foreperiod effect. However, those interactions differentially affected social and nonsocial attention. While typical rapid social orienting was resilient to changing task parameters, sustained social orienting was eliminated only when the contribution of both extraneous processes was reduced. In contrast, orienting elicited by nonsocial arrows grew in magnitude with the reduction of voluntary temporal preparation and was delayed by the joint reduction of tonic alertness and voluntary temporal preparation. Together, these data indicate that cue-specific attention effects are masked by task dynamics of the cuing paradigm and highlight a pivotal role of the cuing task parameters in both the measurement and the theoretical attribution of spatial attention effects.

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Section: Orienting To Social and Nonsocial Cuessupporting

confidence: 50%

Exposing the cuing task: the case of gaze and arrow cues

Hayward

Ristic

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…naturalistic scenes to depict real-world situations. Similarly to, for example, Birmingham, Bischof, and Kingstone (2008) and Birmingham, Bischof, and Kingstone (2009), we found that fixations landed predominately on the human head region. More relevant to the present question, when a person was present, participants' gaze fell sooner on an object that was cued by the person in the scene than when the same object was not cued.…”

Section: Author Notementioning

confidence: 81%

How the presence of persons biases eye movements

Zwickel

Võ

2010

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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We investigated modulation of gaze behavior of observers viewing complex scenes that included a person. To assess spontaneous orientation-following, and in contrast to earlier studies, we did not make the person salient via instruction or low-level saliency. Still, objects that were referred to by the orientation of the person were visited earlier, more often, and longer than when they were not referred to. Analysis of fixation sequences showed that the number of saccades to the cued and uncued objects differed only for saccades that started from the head region, but not for saccades starting from a control object or from a body region. We therefore argue that viewing a person leads to an increase in spontaneous following of the person's viewing direction even when the person plays no role in scene understanding and is not made prominent.

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“…This procedure is necessary when fixation data are compared across ROIs of different physical sizes (e.g., background vs. eyes), as it adjusts for the fact that larger ROIs might receive more fixations by chance because of their size (see Birmingham, Bischof, & Kingstone, 2009, for a similar analysis). It is important to note though that areas of individual dROIs remained constant within statistical comparisons, as our analyses compared fixations across the same temporal points in the clip-that is, breakpoint windows.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social event segmentation

Boggia

Ristic

2015

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Humans are experts in understanding social environments. What perceptual and cognitive processes enable such competent evaluation of social information? Here we show that environmental content is grouped into units of "social perception", which are formed automatically based on the attentional priority given to social information conveyed by eyes and faces. When asked to segment a clip showing a typical daily scenario, participants were remarkably consistent in identifying the boundaries of social events. Moreover, at those social event boundaries, participants' eye movements were reliably directed to actors' eyes and faces. Participants' indices of attention measured during the initial passive viewing, reflecting natural social behaviour, also showed a remarkable correspondence with overt social segmentation behaviour, reflecting the underlying perceptual organization. Together, these data show that dynamic information is automatically organized into meaningful social events on an ongoing basis, strongly suggesting that the natural comprehension of social content in daily life might fundamentally depend on this underlying grouping process.

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Get real! Resolving the debate about equivalent social stimuli

Cited by 65 publications

References 67 publications

Exposing the cuing task: the case of gaze and arrow cues

Exposing the cuing task: the case of gaze and arrow cues

How the presence of persons biases eye movements

Social event segmentation

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