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

Abstract

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.

Does context matter? Effects of robot appearance and reliability on social attention differs based on lifelikeness of gaze task

“…This replicates findings from previous studies showing that even very basic social-cognitive processes like gaze cueing can be top-down modulated by social context information [53], and highlights that certain top-down modulators, such as the physical appearance of an agent, might only exert their effect in relatively lifelike interactions. This observation also provides some clarity regarding the ongoing debate in the literature whether manipulations related to mind perception and/or mentalizing have an effect on social attention [54] or not [55]. The current study suggests that there is an interaction between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms influencing social attention, but that the topdown component might only take effect in sufficiently realistic paradigms (see also [56]).…”

How attention gates social interactions

“…However, interpretive processes also act on evaluative processes. For example, Gobel and colleagues have shown that others’ social rank boosts social orienting only when participants perceived the other agent as a human social partner with whom they were interacting on the same task as opposed to a computer‐delivered cue or a human agent engaged on a different task . Additionally, the same authors reported that the belief of being looked back at has an ability to reverse the preferential responding to high‐status individuals.…”

Brain stimulation to left prefrontal cortex modulates attentional orienting to gaze cues

“…mind ratings increase as a function of physical human-likeness [36,[92][93][94]), which allows us to experimentally manipulate mind perception via physical human-likeness. Second, because mind perception increases activation in social brain networks [52,[95][96][97] and has been shown to modulate social-cognitive processes like gaze cueing on a behavioural level [69,98], using tDCS in the context of a social attention paradigm seems suitable to investigate the outlined research goal. Left prefrontal and left temporoparietal areas were chosen as sites for tDCS stimulation for the following reasons: first, both areas have been implicated in mind perception in previous studies [28,32,34,51,53], and activation in both areas has been shown to correlate with variations in social attention (i.e.…”