Orienting towards social features in naturalistic scenes is reflexive

Abstract

Saliency-based models of visual attention postulate that, when a scene is freely viewed, attention is predominantly allocated to those elements that stand out in terms of their physical properties. However, eye-tracking studies have shown that saliency models fail to predict gaze behavior accurately when social information is included in an image. Notably, gaze pattern analyses revealed that depictions of human beings are heavily prioritized independent of their low-level physical saliency. What remains unknown, however, is whether the prioritization of such social features is a reflexive or a voluntary process. To investigate the early stages of social attention in more detail, participants viewed photographs of naturalistic scenes with and without social features (i.e., human heads or bodies) for 200 ms while their eye movements were being recorded. We observed significantly more first eye movements to regions containing social features than would be expected from a chance level distribution of saccades. Additionally, a generalized linear mixed model analysis revealed that the social content of a region better predicted first saccade direction than its saliency suggesting that social features partially override the impact of low-level physical saliency on gaze patterns. Given the brief image presentation time that precluded visual exploration, our results provide compelling evidence for a reflexive component in social attention. Moreover, the present study emphasizes the importance of considering social influences for a more coherent understanding of human attentional selection.

Attention promotes accurate impression formation

“…Consistent with previous studies (Coutrot & Guyader, ; Rösler, End, & Gamer, ), an inspection of the differences in the proportion of looking time revealed that, overall, participants looked more at persons [ M = 0.96, 95%CI (0.95, 0.97)] rather than the background [ M = 0.04, 95%CI (0.04, 0.05)] ( t = 104.89; p < .0001).…”

How attention gates social interactions

“…Due to their importance, it is thus not surprising that social affordances spontaneously engage attention. And although social affordances often require additional interpretive functions to reveal their full sociocommunicative potential, cues with social connotation appear to be preferentially processed by the perceptual and attentional systems . This general priority is understood to reflect evolutionary adaptations driven by the intrinsic importance of social stimuli for survival and social wellbeing, with atypical patterns often associated with the development of social dysfunctions, such as autism .…”

The Complex Affective Scene Set (COMPASS): Solving the Social Content Problem in Affective Visual Stimulus Sets

“…Within this framework, visual social (i.e., human) content, such as human faces and bodies, has special status in the competition for prioritized processing. For example, faces or bodies are fixated first in naturalistic scenes (e.g., Fletcher-Watson, Findlay, Leekam, & Benson, 2008;Rosler, End, & Gamer, 2017), faces attract gaze in experimental tasks even at a cost (Cerf, Frady, & Koch, 2009), and only responses to social stimuli reflected the effects of anhedonia in people with schizophrenia compared to healthy controls (e.g., Bodapati & Herbener, 2014). However, unbalanced representation of social and nonsocial information in affective stimulus sets has limited the clear determination of effects as attributable to, or independent of, social content.…”