Own-age biases in adults’ and children’s joint attention: Biased face prioritization, but not gaze following!

Abstract

Previous studies have reported own-age biases in younger and older adults in gaze following. We investigated own-age biases in social attentional processes between adults and children by focusing on two aspects of the joint attention process; the extent to which people attend towards an individual's face, and the extent to which they fixate objects that are looked at by this person (i.e., gaze following). Participants viewed images that always contained a child and an adult who either looked towards each other or each looked at objects located to their side. Observers consistently, and rapidly fixated the actor's faces, though the children were faster to fixate the child's face than the adult's faces, whilst the adults were faster to fixate on the adult's face than the child's face. The children also spent significantly more time fixating the child's face than the adult's face, and the opposite pattern of results was found for the adults. Whilst both adults and children prioritized objects when they were looked at by the actor, both groups showed equivalent levels of gaze following, and there was no own-age bias for gaze following. Our results show an own-age bias for prioritizing faces, but not gaze following.

Incidental learning of trust from eye-gaze: Effects of race and facial trustworthiness

“…This supports previous evidence that gaze cues orient attention in a very fast and automatic manner that is difficult to inhibit (Driver et al, 1999;Freebody & Kuhn, 2016;Frischen & Tipper, 2004). Although previous research has found that cueing can be mediated by factors such as social status , dominance (Jones et al, 2010), familiarity (Deaner, Shepherd, & Platt, 2007), race (Dalmaso et al, 2015;Pavan et al, 2011) and trustworthiness (Petrican et al, 2013;Süßenbach & Schönbrodt, 2014), we found no evidence that participants spontaneously considered either of the latter features when processing gaze, suggesting that these mediating effects may rely on the context (e.g., perceived threat) in which participants find themselves experiencing gaze cues.…”

Mental states modulate gaze following, but not automatically

“…Our results illustrate that when participants freely viewed images (Experiment 1), the model's gaze/head orientation influenced where people look. In line with previous research (Fletcher-Watson et al, 2008;Freebody & Kuhn, 2016;Zwickel & Vo, 2010) participants were significantly faster and spent significantly more time fixating objects that were looked towards by the model. However, this effect was not observed when a barrier interrupted the model's line of sight.…”

Don't Get Misdirected! Differences in Overt and Covert Attentional Inhibition between Children and Adults

“…Once the video appeared, all participants immediately fixated the magician's face, which coincides with a large body of research illustrating that faces are prioritized (Birmingham, Bischof, & Kingstone, 2008;Fletcher-Watson, Leekam, Benson, Frank, & Findlay, 2009;Yarbus, 1967). The time to fixate on the face provides valuable insights into the automatic nature of this social attentional orienting (Fletcher-Watson et al, 2009;Freebody & Kuhn, 2016;Kuhn, Kourkoulou, & Leekam, 2010;Zwickel & Vo, 2010). Our children were significantly faster to fixate on the face (M = 260 ms; SD = 53) than the adults (M = 319 ms; SD = 122), t(57) = 2.36, p = .022, which further supports the view that children's eye movements are more strongly driven by bottom-up processes.…”