Social orienting in gaze leading: a mechanism for shared attention

Abstract

Here, we report a novel social orienting response that occurs after viewing averted gaze. We show, in three experiments, that when a person looks from one location to an object, attention then shifts towards the face of an individual who has subsequently followed the person's gaze to that same object. That is, contrary to 'gaze following', attention instead orients in the opposite direction to observed gaze and towards the gazing face. The magnitude of attentional orienting towards a face that 'follows' the participant's gaze is also associated with self-reported autism-like traits. We propose that this gaze leading phenomenon implies the existence of a mechanism in the human social cognitive system for detecting when one's gaze has been followed, in order to establish 'shared attention' and maintain the ongoing interaction.

How attention gates social interactions

“…For example, Edwards and colleagues implemented a procedure in which participants, initially looking a central object placed among multiple faces, had the impression that some of the faces were following their gaze direction (i.e., looking at the same object as the participant) and others were not. Highlighting the importance of mutual engagement, their results indicated greater attentional engagement for faces that followed the observer’s gaze relative to those that did not . These findings dovetail well with work conducted on the topic of shared attention, which has demonstrated the benefits of joint attention in a variety of situations, including interpersonal influences and joint perception, and, as a result, might reflect a form of social tuning, whereby people spontaneously align with social partners who are believed to share the same experience of the world .…”

A review of joint attention and social‐cognitive brain systems in typical development and autism spectrum disorder

“…They observed optical imaging activation of the left frontal pole in 5‐month‐olds when the gaze of a tester followed the activity of the infants. Awareness of attention to self is hypothesized to be a major component of IJA (e.g., Bates et al ., ; Reddy, ; Kim & Mundy, ; Edwards et al ., ) as well as subsequent social‐cognitive development (Schilbach et al ., ). Evidence of the role of attention to self in IJA development comes from studies of interventions that improves IJA in young children with ASD (Kasari et al ., ; Murza et al ., ).…”

Sociomotor action control

“…In many situations, humans try to affect each other's behavior intentionally-for example, when a person tries to direct another person's head or body orientation toward an interesting object by either pointing (Herbort & Kunde, 2016a, b) or gazing toward that object (Bayliss et al, 2013;Edwards, Stephenson, Dalmaso, & Bayliss, 2015). But even without such intentions, other people respond consistently to our actions.…”