Orienting of Attention to Gaze Direction Cues in Rhesus Macaques: Species-Specificity, and Effects of Cue Motion and Reward Predictiveness

Abstract

Primates live in complex social groups and rely on social cues to direct their attention. For example, primates react faster to an unpredictable stimulus after seeing a conspecific looking in the direction of that stimulus. In the current study we tested the specificity of facial cues (gaze direction) for orienting attention and their interaction with other cues that are known to guide attention. In particular, we tested whether macaque monkeys only respond to gaze cues from conspecifics or if the effect generalizes across species. We found an attentional advantage of conspecific faces over human and cartoon faces. Because gaze cues are often conveyed by gesture, we also explored the effect of image motion (a simulated glance) on the orienting of attention in monkeys. We found that the simulated glance did not significantly enhance the speed of orienting for monkey-face stimuli, but had a significant effect for images of human faces. Finally, because gaze cues presumably guide attention toward relevant or rewarding stimuli, we explored whether orienting of attention was modulated by reward predictiveness. When the cue predicted reward location, face, and non-face cues were effective in speeding responses toward the cued location. This effect was strongest for conspecific faces. In sum, our results suggest that while conspecific gaze cues activate an intrinsic process that reflexively directs spatial attention, its effect is relatively small in comparison to other features including motion and reward predictiveness. It is possible that gaze cues are more important for decision-making and voluntary orienting than for reflexive orienting.

Preference for Averageness in Faces Does Not Generalize to Non-Human Primates

“…However, since monkey faces are covered with fur, the smoothed (blurred) skin texture may appear to be less realistic. It has been shown that monkeys prefer viewing real conspecific faces rather than unrealistic cartoon faces (Yu et al, 2012 ). Therefore, different perceptions of blurring facial texture between monkeys and humans may account for the different findings between these two species.…”

Forgetting curve in spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi): Effects of delay but not the amount of information.

“…Experiment 1 showed that for an apparatus with six containers and a 30 s delay, the monkeys made a great number of errors and they used spatial information to solve the task. Previous experiments on attention in humans and rhesus macaques (Ciaramitaro et al, 2001; Yu et al, 2012); navigation in capuchin monkeys (Presotto & Izar, 2010) and facial recognition in chimpanzees (Rosenfield et al, 2019); in which spatial information plays a role, have shown that adding discriminative stimuli, such as color, can improve the accuracy of the subjects in each task. Studies with rhesus macaques in nonnavigational tasks, have shown that adding colors to spatial positions reduces the disruption in memory caused by the administration of kynurenate in the hippocampus (Forcelli et al, 2014).…”