Eye contact boosts the reflexive component of overt gaze following

Abstract

Establishing eye contact with an individual can subsequently lead to a stronger gaze-mediated orienting effect. However, studies exploring this phenomenon have, so far, only assessed manual responses and focused on covert attention -namely, without eye movements. Here, in two experiments, we explored for the first time whether eye contact can also impact on overt attention in an oculomotor task. This approach has two main advantages, in that it relies on more sensitive, online measures of attention allocation and it better mimics real life settings. Participants performed leftwards and rightwards eye movements in response to a central cue. Furthermore, a task-irrelevant central face established -or not -eye contact with the participant, and then averted its gaze either leftwards or rightwards. Hence, eye movement direction was either congruent or incongruent with that of the gaze stimulus. In both experiments, a gaze following behaviour emerged -specifically, smaller saccadic latencies and a greater accuracy emerged on congruent than on incongruent trials -but its magnitude was not modulated by eye contact. However, in Experiment 2 -in which the different eye contact conditions were presented intermixed rather than blocked, thus making eye contact contextually salient -eye contact led to an overall decrement of saccadic latencies and enhanced the reflexive component of gaze following. Taken together, these results provide novel evidence indicating that eye contact can impact on both eye movements programming and overt gaze following mechanisms, at least when eye contact is made contextually salient.

Early saccade planning cannot override oculomotor interference elicited by gaze and arrow distractors

“…As a main result, smaller latencies and a greater accuracy typically emerge on trials in which the instruction cue and the distracting face share the same spatial vectors (e.g., right-right; i.e., a congruent condition) rather than the opposite (e.g., right-left; an incongruent condition), thus indicating that averted eye-gaze stimuli can interfere with oculomotor planning and execution pervasively. Outcomes similar to those reported by Ricciardelli et al (2002) have been documented in subsequent studies employing different types of facial stimuli (e.g., Ciardo, Marino, Actis-Grosso, Rossetti, & Ricciardelli, 2014;Dalmaso, Alessi, Castelli, & Galfano, 2020a;Dalmaso, Galfano, & Castelli, 2015;Porciello, Liuzza, Minio-Paluello, Caprara, & Aglioti, 2016) but also when directional arrows were employed instead of averted-gaze faces (e.g., Kuhn & Benson, 2007;Kuhn & Kingstone, 2009), in line with a rich stream of studies that reported similar attentional effects for both gaze and arrow stimuli in healthy individuals (e.g., Galfano et al, 2012;Hermens & Walker, 2010;Kuhn & Benson, 2007;Kuhn & Kingstone, 2009;Tipples, 2008).…”

The interplay between gaze cueing and facial trait impressions

“…We can interpret our results as in line with this idea, since the experimental task of discriminating target letters did not induce the participants to consider trustworthiness and dominance of face stimuli as relevant features for the task itself. It is also worth noting that previous studies reported modulations of the gaze cueing effect related to the features of the paradigms, which presented different stimulus categories intermixed across trials or separated in blocked conditions (Dalmaso, Alessi, et al, 2020; Pavan et al, 2011; Zhao et al, 2014). In our experiments, stimuli varying in two social dimensions (i.e., high/low dominance and trustworthiness) were randomly presented across trials, and this could have reduced the impact of social traits on attention orienting.…”

Social attention across borders: A cross‐cultural investigation of gaze cueing elicited by same‐ and other‐ethnicity faces

“…This, in turn, adds to a growing body of evidence showing that gaze cueing is not entirely automatic, in that it does not invariably occur, but can be heavily modulated by social variables (Cohen et al ., 2017; Dalmaso et al ., 2020b). This influence, however, tends to be particularly strong when social variables are made salient by the specific experimental context (see, e.g., Dalmaso et al ., 2020a; Pavan et al ., 2011; Weisbuch et al ., 2017).…”

“…Since the end of the past millennium, researchers have attempted to explore the attentional orienting response elicited by averted gaze stimuli and developed the so‐called gaze‐cueing paradigm (see Driver et al ., 1999; Friesen & Kingstone, 1998; Hietanen, 1999; Langton & Bruce, 1999). This has proved as an extremely popular paradigm largely because of its flexibility and potential for providing insightful answers in many different fields within psychological science, including social, developmental, and comparative psychology (e.g., Bayliss & Tipper, 2005; Carraro et al ., 2017; Chen & Zhao, 2015; Ciardo, Ricciardelli, Lugli, Rubichi, & Iani, 2015; Dalmaso, Alessi, Castelli, & Galfano, 2020a; Deaner, Shepherd, & Platt, 2006; Farroni, Massaccesi, Pividori, & Johnson, 2004; Marotta et al ., 2014, 2018; Pickron, Fava, & Scott, 2017; Shepherd, 2010).…”