The gaze cueing effect is characterized by faster attentional orienting to a gazed-at than a non-gazed-at target. This effect is often enhanced when the gazing face bears an emotional expression, though this finding is modulated by a number of factors. Here, we tested whether the type of task performed might be one such modulating factor. Target localization and target discrimination tasks are the two most commonly used gaze cueing tasks, and they arguably differ in (...) cognitive resources, which could impact how emotional expression and gaze cues are integrated to orient attention. In a within-subjects design, participants performed both target localization and discrimination gaze cueing tasks with neutral, happy, and fearful faces. The gaze cueing effect for neutral faces was greatly reduced in the discrimination task relative to the localization task, and the emotional enhancement of the gaze cueing effect was only present in the localization task and only when this task was performed first. These results suggest that cognitive resources are needed for gaze cueing and for the integration of emotional expressions and gaze cues. We propose that a shift toward local processing may be the mechanism by which the discrimination task interferes with the emotional modulation of gaze cueing. The results support the idea that gaze cueing can be greatly modulated by top-down influences and cognitive resources and thus taps into endogenous attention. Results are discussed within the context of the recently proposed EyeTune model of social attention. (shrink)

Gaze cueing effect (GCE) refers to attention orienting towards the gazed-at location, characterised by faster responses to gazed-at than non-gazed-at stimuli. A previous study investigated the effects of affective priming on GCE and reported that threatening primes enhanced GCE. However, it remains unknown whether the threat or heightened arousal potentiated GCE. We investigated how highly arousing threatening and positive primes, compared to low arousing neutral primes modulate GCE. After a brief exposure to an affective prime (pictures of (...) threat or erotica) or a neutral prime, participants detected an asterisk validly or invalidly cued by the gaze direction of a neutral face. The results showed that the threatening primes diminished the magnitude of GCE. The highly arousing positive primes did not have an effect on GCE. Further analyses showed that, as compared to neutral priming, the reaction times after threatening primes were shortened on invalid trials. This finding was interpreted to suggest that the threatening primes enhanced goal-directed target detection and attenuated attention orienting by irrelevant gaze cues via improving executive control. In sum, the present findings indicate that threat priming modulates GCE, not because of heightened arousal but because of the threat. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAnother individual’s gaze automatically shifts an observer’s attention to a location. This reflexive response occurs even when the gaze is presented subliminally over a short period. Another’s gaze also increases the preference level for items in the gaze direction; however, it was previously unclear if this effect occurs when the gaze is presented subliminally. This study showed that the preference levels for nonsense figures looked at by a subliminal gaze were significantly greater than (...) those for items that were subliminally looked away from. Targets that were looked at by a subliminal gaze were detected faster ; however, the participants were unable to detect the gaze direction. These results indicate that another individual’s gaze automatically increases the preference levels for items in the gaze direction without conscious awareness. (shrink)

Referential gaze has been shown to benefit language processing in situated communication in terms of shifting visual attention and leading to shorter reaction times on subsequent tasks. The present study simultaneously assessed both visual attention and, importantly, the immediate cognitive load induced at different stages of sentence processing. We aimed to examine the dynamics of combining visual and linguistic information in creating anticipation for a specific object and the effect this has on language processing. We report evidence from (...) three visual‐world eye‐tracking experiments, showing that referential gaze leads to a shift in visual attention toward the cued object, which consequently lowers the effort required for processing the linguistic reference. Importantly, perceiving and following the gaze cue did not prove costly in terms of cognitive effort, unless the cued object did not fit the verb selectional preferences. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHumans are social beings that often interact in multi-individual environments. As such, we are frequently confronted with nonverbal social signals, including eye-gaze direction, from multiple individuals. Yet, the factors that allow for the prioritisation of certain gaze cues over others are poorly understood. Using a modified conflicting gaze paradigm, we tested the hypothesis that fearful gaze would be favoured amongst competing gaze cues. We further hypothesised that this effect is related to the increased sclera (...) exposure, which is characteristic of fearful expressions. Across three experiments, we found that fearful, but not happy, gaze guides observers’ attention over competing non-emotional gaze. The guidance of attention by fearful gaze appears to be linked to increased sclera exposure. However, differences in sclera exposure do not prioritise competing gazes of other types. Thus, fearful gaze guides attention among competing cues and this effect is facilitated by increased sclera exposure... (shrink)

The last two decades have witnessed growing interest in the study of social cognition and its multiple facets, including trust. Interpersonal trust is generally understood as the belief that others are not likely to harm you. When meeting strangers, judgments of trustworthiness are mostly based on fast evaluation of facial appearance, unless information about past behavior is available. In the past decade studies have tried to understand the complex relationship between trust and joint visual attention (i.e. attentional orienting following another (...) person’s gaze). This review will focus on the studies that used a gaze-cueing paradigm to explore this relationship. One study found enhanced gaze-following behavior with trustworthy faces; another one found stronger effects of gaze-following with faces associated with undesirable behavior. Notably, the majority of studies failed to observe significant interactions between trust and gaze-following. Overall, the evidence is mixed, and studies have highlighted the complexity of this relationship. Multiple factors seem to play a role, including the type of manipulation to induce trust, the level of trait-anxiety, and gender. We conclude that further investigation is needed to clarify whether an interaction exists between trust and joint visual attention, possibly focusing on the potential role of perceived threat. (shrink)

The present study employed the gaze-contingent window paradigm to investigate parafoveal and peripheral cueing and masking effects on saccadic selectivity in a triple-conjunction visual search task. In the cueing conditions, the information shown outside the gaze-contingent window was restricted to the feature or feature pair shared between the target and a particular distractor type. In the masking conditions, no stimulus features were shown outside the window. Significant cueing and masking effects on saccadic selectivity were observed (...) for saccades directed at items within the window, where all features were visible across experimental conditions. Cueing a particular feature or feature pair biased saccadic selectivity towards this feature or feature pair, while masking generally reduced saccadic selectivity. These findings support the concept of visual guidance being a preattentive process that operates in parallel across the display. © 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. (shrink)

Although the majority of literature has shown undistinguishable attentional effects when eye-gaze and arrows are used as cues, recent research has found that whereas eye-gaze selectively orient attention to the specific location or part of the object looked at, arrows unselectively direct attention towards parts of the environment. However, it is unclear whether this dissociation between gaze and arrow cues is related to social cognitive mechanisms such as the attribution of mental states (Theory of Mind, ToM). We (...) aimed at replicating the dissociation between gaze and arrow cues and investigating sex differences in attentional object selection triggered by these two types of stimuli. While we replicated the arrow-gaze dissociation, this was equivalent in the male and female population. This finding seems to run counter the intuition that theory of mind abilities can account for the dissociation observed between gaze and arrow cues since greater ToM abilities have been generally shown in females. However, this conclusion it must be interpreted with caution since no differences in ToM abilities and autistic quotient scores were observed between male and female in our sample. Further research is needed to shed light on this issue. (shrink)

Gaze direction signals another person’s focus of interest. Facial expressions convey information about their mental state. Appropriate responses to these signals should reflect their combined influence, yet current evidence suggests that gaze-cueing effects for objects near an observed face are not modulated by its emotional expression. Here, we extend the investigation of perceived gaze direction and emotional expression by considering their combined influence on affective judgments. While traditional response-time measures revealed equal gaze-cueing effects for (...) happy and disgust faces, affective evaluations critically depended on the combined product of gaze and emotion. Target objects looked at with a happy expression were liked more than objects looked at with a disgust expression. Objects not looked at were rated equally for both expressions. Our results demonstrate that facial expression does modulate the way that observers utilize gaze cues: Objects attended by others are evaluated according to the valence of their facial expression. C 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Gaze direction is an important social cue for understanding the intentions of other people. Indeed, interacting with others requires the ability to encode their current focus of attention in order to predict their future actions. Previous studies have showed that when asked to detect or identify a target, people are faster if shown a gaze oriented toward rather than away from that target. Most importantly, there is evidence that the emotion conveyed by the face with the averted (...) class='Hi'>gaze matters. We further tested the interplay between gaze and face emotion in the context of manipulable objects to understand whether and to what extent other people's gaze influences our own actions toward objects. Participants judged whether a target graspable object was upright or inverted after viewing a face cue with a central or averted gaze. Importantly, the target's handle could be oriented toward the gazed-at location or the opposite side such that gaze and handle were corresponding or non-corresponding in space. Furthermore, we manipulated the expression of the cue by using neutral and fearful faces. Results showed a handle-response compatibility effect only with fearful cues with a central gaze. (shrink)

Observing averted eye gaze results in the automatic allocation of attention to the gazed-at location. The role of the orientation of the face that produces the gaze cue was investigated. The eyes in the face could look left or right in a head-centred frame, but the face itself could be oriented 90 degrees clockwise or anticlockwise such that the eyes were gazing up or down. Significant cueing effects to targets presented to the left or right of the (...) screen were found in these head orientation conditions. This suggests that attention was directed to the side to which the eyes would have been looking towards, had the face been presented upright. This finding provides evidence that head orientation can affect gaze following, even when the head orientation alone is not a social cue. It also shows that the mechanism responsible for the allocation of attention following a gaze cue can be influenced by intrinsic object-based (i.e. head-centred) properties of the task-irrelevant cue. (shrink)

This article reviews research into the attention mechanisms underlying a critical behavior in social interactions. It discusses findings from studies that investigate social gaze as a cue to attention and considers the perceptual mechanisms that may underlie these effects and their possible social functions. There is still debate as to whether gaze stimuli are “special” in terms of the attention processes engaged. However, there is evidence for the distinctive nature of gaze cues in their involvement in other (...) aspects of social perception such as person identity and emotional expression perception. Further, the sensitivity to another person's gaze direction varies across individuals within normal populations and in clinical populations, and these individual differences provide further insights into the key role of gaze cues in social cognition. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Eye gaze is a ubiquitous cue in child–caregiver interactions, and infants are highly attentive to eye gaze from very early on. However, the question of why infants show gaze-sensitive behavior, and what role this sensitivity to gaze plays in their language development, is not yet well-understood. To gain a better understanding of the role of eye gaze in infants' language learning, we conducted a broad systematic review of the developmental literature for all studies that investigate (...) the role of eye gaze in infants' language development. Across 77 peer-reviewed articles containing data from typically developing human infants in the domain of language development, we identified two broad themes. The first tracked the effect of eye gaze on four developmental domains: vocabulary development, word–object mapping, object processing, and speech processing. Overall, there is considerable evidence that infants learn more about objects and are more likely to form word–object mappings in the presence of eye gaze cues, both of which are necessary for learning words. In addition, there is good evidence for longitudinal relationships between infants' gaze following abilities and later receptive and expressive vocabulary. However, many domains are understudied; further work is needed to decide whether gaze effects are specific to tasks, such as word–object mapping or whether they reflect a general learning enhancement mechanism. The second theme explored the reasons why eye gaze might be facilitative for learning, addressing the question of whether eye gaze is treated by infants as a specialized socio-cognitive cue. We concluded that the balance of evidence supports the idea that eye gaze facilitates infants' learning by enhancing their arousal, memory, and attentional capacities to a greater extent than other low-level attentional cues. However, as yet, there are too few studies that directly compare the effect of eye gaze cues and non-social, attentional cues for strong conclusions to be drawn. We also suggest that there might be a developmental effect, with eye gaze, over the course of the first 2 years of life, developing into a truly ostensive cue that enhances language learning across the board. (shrink)

Looking times and gaze behavior indicate that infants can predict the goal state of an observed simple action event (e.g., object‐directed grasping) already in the first year of life. The present paper mainly focuses on infants’ predictive gaze‐shifts toward the goal of an ongoing action. For this, infants need to generate a forward model of the to‐be‐obtained goal state and to disengage their gaze from the moving agent at a time when information about the action event is (...) still incomplete. By about 6 months of age, infants show goal‐predictive gaze‐shifts, but mainly for familiar actions that they can perform themselves (e.g., grasping) and for familiar agents (e.g., a human hand). Therefore, some theoretical models have highlighted close relations between infants’ ability for action‐goal prediction and their motor development and/or emerging action experience. Recent research indicates that infants can also predict action goals of familiar simple actions performed by non‐human agents (e.g., object‐directed grasping by a mechanical claw) when these agents display agency cues, such as self‐propelled movement, equifinality of goal approach, or production of a salient action effect. This paper provides a review on relevant findings and theoretical models, and proposes that the impacts of action experience and of agency cues can be explained from an action‐event perspective. In particular, infants’ goal‐predictive gaze‐shifts are seen as resulting from an interplay between bottom‐up processing of perceptual information and top‐down influences exerted by event schemata that store information about previously executed or observed actions. (shrink)

Recognition of the identity of familiar faces in conditions with poor visibility or over large changes in head angle, lighting and partial occlusion is far more accurate than recognition of unfamiliar faces in similar conditions. Here we used a visual search paradigm to test if one class of social cues transmitted by faces – direction of another’s attention as conveyed by gaze direction and head orientation – is perceived more rapidly in personally familiar faces than in unfamiliar faces. We (...) found a strong effect of familiarity on the detection of these social cues, suggesting that the times to process these signals in familiar faces are markedly faster than the corresponding processing times for unfamiliar faces. In the light of these new data, hypotheses on the organization of the visual system for processing faces are formulated and discussed. (shrink)

The communicative interactions of very young children almost always involve language, gesture and directed gaze. In this study, ninety-six children were asked to determine the location of a hidden toy by understanding a communicative act that contained none of these familiar means. A light-and-sound mechanism placed behind the hiding place and illuminated by a centrally placed switch was used to indicate the location of the toy. After a communicative training session, an experimenter pressed the switch either deliberately or accidentally, (...) and with or without ostension. In no condition did she orient towards the hiding place. When the switch was pressed intentionally, children used the light-and-sound cue to find the toy – and tended to do so even in the absence of ostensive eye contact. When the experimenter pressed the switch accidentally, children searched randomly – demonstrating that they were tracking her communicative intent, and not merely choosing on the basis of salience. The absence of an effect of ostension contradicts research that ostension helps children to interpret the communicative intentions underlying unfamiliar signs. We explain this by concluding that while it may play a role in establishing a communicative interaction, it is not necessary for sustaining one; and that even with a highly novel communicative act – involving none of the means of communication on which children typically rely – three-year-olds can comprehend the communicative intentions behind an intentionally produced act. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a surge in accounts motivated by information theory that consider language production to be partially driven by a preference for communicative efficiency. Evidence from discourse production (i.e., production beyond the sentence level) has been argued to suggest that speakers distribute information across discourse so as to hold the conditional per-word entropy associated with each word constant, which would facilitate efficient information transfer (Genzel & Charniak, 2002). This hypothesis implies that the conditional (contextualized) probabilities of linguistic units (...) affect speakers’ preferences during production. Here, we extend this work in two ways. First, we explore how preceding cues are integrated into contextualized probabilities, a question which so far has received little to no attention. Specifically, we investigate how a cue's maximal informativity about upcoming words (the cue's effectiveness) decays as a function of the cue's recency. Based on properties of linguistic discourses as well as properties of human memory, we analytically derive a model of cue effectiveness decay and evaluate it against cross-linguistic data from 12 languages. Second, we relate the information theoretic accounts of discourse production to well-established mechanistic (activation-based) accounts: We relate contextualized probability distributions over words to their relative activation in a lexical network given preceding discourse. (shrink)

The pupils of the eyes reflexively constrict in light and dilate in dark to optimize retinal illumination. Non-visual cognitive factors, like attention, arousal, decision-making, etc., also influence pupillary light response. During passive viewing, the eccentricity of a stimulus modulates the pupillary aperture size driven by spatially weighted corneal flux density, which is the product of luminance and the area of the stimulus. Whether the scope of attention also influences PLR remains unclear. In this study, we contrasted the pupil dynamics between (...) diffused and focused attentional conditions during decision-making, while the global CFD remained the same in the two conditions. A population of 20 healthy humans participated in a pair of forced choice tasks. They distributed attention to the peripheral decision cue in one task, and concentrated at the center in the other to select the target from four alternatives for gaze orientation. The location of this cue did not influence participants’ reaction time. However, the magnitude of constriction was significantly less in the task that warranted attention to be deployed at the center than on the periphery. We observed similar pupil dynamics when participants either elicited or canceled a saccadic eye movement, which ruled out pre-saccadic obligatory attentional orientation contributing to PLR. We further addressed how the location of attentional deployment might have influenced PLR. We simulated a biomechanical model of PLR with visual stimulation of different strengths as inputs corresponding to the two attentional conditions. In this homeomorphic model, the computational characteristic of each element was derived from the physiological and/or mechanical properties of the corresponding biological element. The simulation of this model successfully mimicked the observed data. In contrast to common belief that the global ambient luminosity drives pupillary response, the results of our study suggest that the effective CFD determined via the luminance multiplied by the size of the stimulus at the location of deployed attention in the visual space is critical for the magnitude of pupillary constriction. (shrink)

We argue that pre-cueing studies show that perception is cognitively penetrated via mental imagery. It is important to be clear about the relation between attention and mental imagery here. We do not want to question the role of attention in pre-cueing studies. After all, it is attention that is being pre-cued. The pre-cue draws attention to certain features, which via top-down connections induces mental imagery for the pre-cued properties, which, then, after stimulus-presentation, interacts with and influences the online (...) computations that process stimulus features. That is, what mediates the cognitive penetration of perceptual processing is not pre-cued attention, but cue-induced mental imagery. (shrink)

In contextual cueing, previously encountered context tends to facilitate the detection of the target embedded in it than when the target appears in a novel context. In this study, we investigated whether the contextual cueing could develop at early time when the search display was presented briefly. In four experiments, participants searched for a target T in an array of distractor Ls. The results showed that with a rather short presentation time of the search display, participants were able (...) to learn the spatial context and speeded up their response time overall, with the learning effect lasting for a long period. Specifically, the contextual cueing effect was observed either with or without a mask after a duration of 300-ms presentation of the search display. Such a context learning under rapid presentation could not operate only with the local context information repeated, thus suggesting that a global context was required to guide spatial attention when the viewing time of the search display was limited. Overall, these findings indicate that contextual cueing might arise at an “early,” target selection stage and that the global context is necessary for the context learning under rapid presentation to function. (shrink)

Participants maneuvered a rat image through a circular region on the computer screen to find a hidden target platform, blending aspects of two well-known spatial tasks. Like the Morris water maze task, participants first experienced a series of learning trials before having to navigate to the hidden target platform from different locations and orientations. Like the dot-location task, they determined the location of a position within a two-dimensional circular region. This procedure provided a way to examine how the number of (...) surrounding cues (1, 2, or 3) affects the memory for spatial location in navigation. Memory performance was better when there were more cues and when targets were close to cues, consistent with the idea that cues bolster fine-grain memory, especially in proximal regions. Early and late measures of bias in memory reflected biases in a direction toward the nearest cue, implicating a cue-based category structure of the navigational space. Collectively, results suggest cue-based spatial memory representations that have been inferred from the dot-location task generalize to a navigation task within a simple, computer-based environment, as demonstrated by the good fits of the spatial model developed for the dot-location task (Fitting, Wedell, & Allen, 2005, 2007). (shrink)

Evidence for incubation effects in problem-solving is increasing, but the mechanisms that underlie incubation are unclear. An experiment tested two hypotheses about incubation: Spreading activation and opportunistic assimilation. Participants solved easy or difficult remote associates tasks without incubation period, or with an incubation period filled with high or low cognitive load tasks. A lexical decision task with cue and neutral words was given either before or after a second problem attempt. When solving difficult problems, the low-load incubation group benefitted more (...) from the presence of a cue than the high-load incubation group, and the opposite was found with easy problems. Neither incubation nor an initial problem attempt affected lexical decision times to cue words. The results favour opportunistic assimilation as an explanation of incubation effects. They also suggest a differential role for attentional allocation depending on problem difficulty, easy problems benefitting from focused attent.. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe examined the utility of a gaze cueing paradigm to examine sensitivity to differences among negatively valenced expressions. Participants judged target stimuli, the lo...

ABSTRACTThis study is a direct replication of gaze-liking effect using the same design, stimuli and procedure. The gaze-liking effect describes the tendency for people to rate objects as more likeable when they have recently seen a person repeatedly gaze toward rather than away from the object. However, as subsequent studies show considerable variability in the size of this effect, we sampled a larger number of participants than the original study to gain a more precise (...) estimate of the gaze-liking effect size. Our results indicate a much smaller standardised effect size than that of the original study. Our smaller effect size was not due to general insensitivity to eye-gaze effects because the same sample showed a clear gaze-cuing effect – faster reaction times when eyes looked toward vs away from target objects. We discuss the implications of our findings for future studies wishing to study the gaze-liking effect. (shrink)

This study is aimed to identify the relative effect of online review ratings and perceived crowding on purchase intentions of a consumer. Our study also investigated the contingent effect of gender and perceived crowding between the relationship of exogenous and endogenous variables. This study was conducted in the Malaysian restaurant industry. We applied the purposive sampling technique to identify respondents, the mall intercept survey method was used for data collection. Smart PLS software was applied for data analysis. This (...) study demonstrates through its results that online review ratings and perceived crowding have a positive effect on purchase intentions of a consumer. Moreover, if a consumer perceives crowding at a restaurant, this has a positive contingent effect on the relationship between review ratings and purchase intentions. This demonstrates that the consumer is more inclined to choose a restaurant with a high online review rating and has high perceived crowding at some unfamiliar place. Lastly, no evidence is found for the gender difference between review rating and purchase intentions; however, gender shows contingent effect and results confirmed that males preferred more crowded restaurants as compared to females. There are theoretical and practical implications for managers in the findings of this study. (shrink)