Visual attention and action: How cueing, direct mapping, and social interactions drive orienting

Atkinson, Mark A.; Simpson, Andrew; Cole, Geoff G.

doi:10.3758/s13423-017-1354-0

Cited by 28 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 229 publications

(277 reference statements)

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“…Much of the effort focused on others' gaze direction and its impact on spatial orienting. It showed that other's gaze direction can reallocate our attention not always in an automatic, bottom-up way, determined by its sole physical saliency, but also in a voluntary, top-down way, driven by both the observer's social relevance and the subject's goals (Koval et al, 2005;Birmingham and Kingstone, 2009;Greene et al, 2009;Chauhan et al, 2017;Atkinson et al, 2018). In this eye gaze domain too, familiar peers may have special effects (Chauhan et al, 2017).…”

Section: Social Attention Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Peer Presence Effects on Eye Movements and Attentional Performance

Tricoche

Ferrand-Verdejo

Pélisson

et al. 2020

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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Social facilitation" refers to the enhancement or impairment of performance engendered by the mere presence of others. It has been demonstrated for a diversity of behaviors. This study assessed whether it also concerns attention and eye movements and if yes, which decision-making mechanisms it affects. Human volunteers were tested in three different tasks (saccades, visual search, and continuous performance) either alone or in the presence of a familiar peer. The results failed to reveal any significant peer influence on the visual search and continuous performance tasks. For saccades, by contrast, they showed a negative or positive peer influence depending on the complexity of the testing protocol. Pro-and anti-saccades were both inhibited when pseudorandomly mixed, and both facilitated when performed separately. Peer presence impaired or improved reaction times, i.e., the speed to initiate the saccade, as well as peak velocity, i.e., the driving force moving the eye toward the target. Effect sizes were large, with Cohen's d-values ranging for reaction times (RTs) from 0.50 to 0.95. Analyzing RT distributions using the LATER (Linear Approach to Threshold with Ergodic Rate) model revealed that social inhibition of pro-and anti-saccades in the complex protocol was associated with a significant increase in the rate of rise. The present demonstration that the simple presence of a familiar peer can inhibit or facilitate saccades depending on task difficulty strengthens a growing body of evidence showing social modulations of eye movements and attention processes. The present lack of effect on visual search and continuous performance tasks contrasts with peer presence effects reported earlier using similar tasks, and future studies are needed to determine whether it is due to an intermediate level of difficulty maximizing individual variability. Together with an earlier study of the social inhibition of anti-saccades also using the LATER model, which showed an increase of the threshold, the present increase of the rate of rise suggests that peer presence can influence both the top-down and bottom-up attention-related processes guiding the decision to move the eyes.

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Section: Social Attention Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Peer Presence Effects on Eye Movements and Attentional Performance

Tricoche

Ferrand-Verdejo

Pélisson

et al. 2020

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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“…In this sense, not all social cues influence the attention and action system in the same way. As such, social cues (and indeed, non-social centrally-presented cues) should not be taken as one and the same and nuanced explorations of cueing effects are required (see Atkinson, Simpson, & Cole, 2018 for a review and discussion).…”

Section: Processing Of Gaze and Hand Cues 25mentioning

confidence: 99%

Probing the time course of facilitation and inhibition in gaze cueing of attention in an upper-limb reaching task

Yoxon

Constable

Welsh

2019

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Previous work has revealed that social cues, such as gaze and pointed fingers, can lead to a shift in the focus of another person's attention. Research investigating the mechanisms of these shifts of attention has typically employed detection or localization button pressing tasks. Because indepth analyses of the spatio-temporal characteristics of aiming movements can provide additional insights into the dynamics of the processing of stimuli, the current study used a reaching paradigm to further explore the processing of social cues. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants aimed to a left or right location after a non-predictive eye gaze cue towards one of the target locations. Seven stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) between 100 and 2400 ms were used. Both temporal (reaction time-RT) and spatial (initial movement angle-IMA) characteristics of the movements were analysed. RTs were shorter for cued (gazed-at) targets than to uncued targets across most SOAs. There were, however, no statistical differences in IMA between movements to cued and uncued targets suggesting action planning was not affected by the gaze cue. In Experiment 3, the social cue was a finger pointing to one of the two target locations. Finger pointing cues generated significant cuing effects in both RT and IMA. Overall, these results indicate that eye gaze and finger pointing social cues are processed differently. Perception-action coupling (i.e., a tight link between the response and the social cue that is presented) may play a role in the generation of action, and deviation of trajectories towards cued and uncued targets.

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“…Thus, transient motion and action observation need not be mutually exclusive. Indeed, the combining of attention orienting and action observation processes is explicit in the Bgaze-imitation hypothesis^(see Atkinson, Simpson & Cole, 2018;Mansfield, Farroni, & Johnson, 2003). This hypothesis posits that observing eye gaze generates an oculomotor program in the observer, which subsequently induces the same gaze behavior.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of transients in action observation

Cole

Welsh

Skarratt

2019

Atten Percept Psychophys

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A large number of studies have now described the various ways in which the observation of another person's dynamic movement can influence the speed with which the observer is able to prepare a motor action themselves. The typical results are most often explained with reference to theories that link perception and action. Such theories argue that the cognitive structures associated with each share common representations. Consequently, action preparation and action observation are often said to be functionally equivalent. However, the dominance of these theories in explaining action observation effects has masked the potential contribution from processes associated with the detection of low-level Btransients^resulting from observing a body movement, such as motion and sound. In the present review, we describe work undertaken in one particular action observation phenomenon (Bsocial inhibition of return^) and show that the transient account provides the best explanation of the effect. We argue that future work should consider attention capture and orienting as a potential contributing factor to action observation effects more broadly.

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Visual attention and action: How cueing, direct mapping, and social interactions drive orienting

Cited by 28 publications

References 229 publications

Peer Presence Effects on Eye Movements and Attentional Performance

Peer Presence Effects on Eye Movements and Attentional Performance

Probing the time course of facilitation and inhibition in gaze cueing of attention in an upper-limb reaching task

The role of transients in action observation

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