Looking while eating: The importance of social context to social attention

Wu, David W.–L.; Bischof, Walter F.; Kingstone, Alan

doi:10.1038/srep02356

Cited by 40 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 29 publications

(67 reference statements)

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“…For example, people avoid engaging in eye contact when sitting in a waiting room with a live person, but not when viewing that person's video recording (Laidlaw et al, 2011), and they avoid following the gaze of another person, when that person can see them (Gallup et al, 2012). Contrarily, social norms increase gaze contact in other social contexts such as sharing meals, so that when eating salad with another person compared to when eating salad alone, people look more up from their plate (Wu et al, 2013). In these previous studies, it cannot be ruled out that the differences in eye movements were, at least to some extent, due to differences in stimuli.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…For example, while studies conducted in laboratories found that people tend to look predominantly to targets' eyes (e.g., Foulsham et al, 2010;Smith & Mital, 2013;Vo, Smith, Mital, & Henderson, 2012), studies conducted in real life situations found that people tend to avoid direct eye contact with targets (e.g., Gallup et al, 2012;Laidlaw, Foulsham, Kuhn, & Kingstone, 2011). Indeed, gazing behavior in real life is influenced by the potential for social interactions (Laidlaw et al, 2011), joint attention (Gallup et al, 2012), and social norms (Wu, Bischof, & Kingstone, 2013). Such critically relevant social information are often absent when examining eye movements in laboratory settings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

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The dual function of social gaze

2015

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Ears cannot speak, lips cannot hear, but eyes can both signal and perceive. For human beings, this dual function makes the eyes a remarkable tool for social interaction. For psychologists trying to understand eye movements, however, their dual function causes a fundamental ambiguity. In order to contrast signaling and perceiving functions of social gaze, we manipulated participants' beliefs about social context as they looked at the same stimuli. Participants watched videos of faces of higher and lower ranked people, while they themselves were filmed. They believed either that the recordings of them would later be seen by the people in the videos or that no-one would see them. This manipulation significantly changed how participants responded to the social rank of the target faces. Specifically, when they believed that the targets would later be looking at them, and so could use gaze to signal information, participants looked proportionally less at the eyes of the higher ranked targets. We conclude that previous claims about eye movements and face perception that are based on a single social context can only be generalized with caution. A complete understanding of face perception needs to address both functions of social gaze.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

The dual function of social gaze

2015

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“…Therefore, future research should try to examine whether the findings of the present study hold true under varying task demands. Third, recent research provided evidence that social context (e.g., sitting with others in a waiting room or eating together with them) may modulate the extent to which humans attend to other people (e.g., Laidlaw et al, 2011; Foulsham et al, 2011; Wu et al, 2013; Gregory et al, 2015). Although the current study made important advancements in terms of ecologically valid stimulus material, our laboratory experiment did not allow for estimating the influence of social context.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preferential Processing of Social Features and Their Interplay with Physical Saliency in Complex Naturalistic Scenes

End

Gamer

2017

Front. Psychol.

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According to so-called saliency-based attention models, attention during free viewing of visual scenes is particularly allocated to physically salient image regions. In the present study, we assumed that social features in complex naturalistic scenes would be processed preferentially irrespective of their physical saliency. Therefore, we expected worse prediction of gazing behavior by saliency-based attention models when social information is present in the visual field. To test this hypothesis, participants freely viewed color photographs of complex naturalistic social (e.g., including heads, bodies) and non-social (e.g., including landscapes, objects) scenes while their eye movements were recorded. In agreement with our hypothesis, we found that social features (especially heads) were heavily prioritized during visual exploration. Correspondingly, the presence of social information weakened the influence of low-level saliency on gazing behavior. Importantly, this pattern was most pronounced for the earliest fixations indicating automatic attentional processes. These findings were further corroborated by a linear mixed model approach showing that social features (especially heads) add substantially to the prediction of fixations beyond physical saliency. Taken together, the current study indicates gazing behavior for naturalistic scenes to be better predicted by the interplay of social and physically salient features than by low-level saliency alone. These findings strongly challenge the generalizability of saliency-based attention models and demonstrate the importance of considering social influences when investigating the driving factors of human visual attention.

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“…When people look at others' faces, gaze patterns vary significantly depending on when looking at a live or pre-recorded video (Laidlaw, Foulsham, Kuhn, & Kingstone, 2011), or whether the face is looking directly at them or not (Gobel, Chen, & Richardson, 2017). Indeed, people are very much aware of social scripts that govern when it is appropriate to look and when it is not (Foulsham, Walker, & Kingstone, 2011;Laidlaw, Rothwell, & Kingstone, 2016;Wu, Bischof, & Kingstone, 2013).…”

Section: The Fourth Wall Of Cognitive Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Social Beliefs and Visual Attention: How the Social Relevance of a Cue Influences Spatial Orienting

Göbel¹,

Tufft

Richardson

2017

Cognitive Science

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We are highly tuned to each other's visual attention. Perceiving the eye or hand movements of another person can influence the timing of a saccade or the reach of our own. However, the explanation for such spatial orienting in interpersonal contexts remains disputed. Is it due to the social appearance of the cue—a hand or an eye—or due to its social relevance—a cue that is connected to another person with attentional and intentional states? We developed an interpersonal version of the Posner spatial cueing paradigm. Participants saw a cue and detected a target at the same or a different location, while interacting with an unseen partner. Participants were led to believe that the cue was either connected to the gaze location of their partner or was generated randomly by a computer (Experiment 1), and that their partner had higher or lower social rank while engaged in the same or a different task (Experiment 2). We found that spatial cue‐target compatibility effects were greater when the cue related to a partner's gaze. This effect was amplified by the partner's social rank, but only when participants believed their partner was engaged in the same task. Taken together, this is strong evidence in support of the idea that spatial orienting is interpersonally attuned to the social relevance of the cue—whether the cue is connected to another person, who this person is, and what this person is doing—and does not exclusively rely on the social appearance of the cue. Visual attention is not only guided by the physical salience of one's environment but also by the mental representation of its social relevance.

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Looking while eating: The importance of social context to social attention

Cited by 40 publications

References 29 publications

The dual function of social gaze

The dual function of social gaze

Preferential Processing of Social Features and Their Interplay with Physical Saliency in Complex Naturalistic Scenes

Social Beliefs and Visual Attention: How the Social Relevance of a Cue Influences Spatial Orienting

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