The Average Reward Rate Modulates Behavioral and Neural Indices of Effortful Control Allocation.

People tend to avoid exerting cognitive effort, and findings from recent behavioral studies suggest that effort allocation is in part determined by the opportunity cost of slothful responding-operationalized as the average reward rate per unit time. When the average rate of reward is high, individuals make more errors in cognitive control tasks, presumably owing to a withdrawal of costly cognitive processing. An open question remains whether the presumed modulations of cognitively effortful control processes are observable at the neural level. Here, we measured EEG while participants completed the Simon task, a well-known response conflict task, while the experienced average reward rate fluctuated across trials. We examined neural activity associated with the opportunity cost of time by applying generalized eigendecomposition, a hypothesis-driven source separation technique, to identify a midfrontal component associated with the average reward rate. Fluctuations in average reward rate modulated not only component amplitude but also, most importantly, component theta power (4-8 Hz). Higher average reward rate was associated with reduced theta power, suggesting that the opportunity of time modulates effort allocation. These neural results provide evidence for the idea that people strategically modulate the amount of cognitive effort they exert based on the opportunity cost of time.

The eyes do not have it after all? Attention is not automatically biased towards faces and eyes.

It is commonly accepted that attention is spontaneously biased towards faces and eyes. However, the role of stimulus features and task settings in this finding has not yet been systematically investigated. Here, we tested if faces and facial features bias attention spontaneously when stimulus factors, task properties, response conditions, and eye movements are controlled. In three experiments, participants viewed face, house, and control scrambled face-house images in an upright and inverted orientation. The task was to discriminate a target that appeared with equal probability at the previous location of the face, house, or the control image. In all experiments, our data indicated no spontaneous biasing of attention for targets occurring at the previous location of the face. Experiment 3, which measured oculomotor biasing, suggested a reliable but infrequent saccadic bias towards the eye region of upright faces. Importantly, these results did not reflect our specific laboratory settings, as in Experiment 4, we present a full replication of a classic finding in the literature demonstrating reliable social attention bias. Together, these data suggest that attentional biasing for social information is task and context mediated, and less robust than originally thought.

Attention promotes accurate impression formation.

OBJECTIVE: An ability to form accurate impressions of others is vital for adaptive social behavior in humans. Here, we examined if attending to persons more is associated with greater accuracy in personality impressions. METHOD: We asked 42 observers (36 females; mean age = 21 years, age range = 18-28; expected power = 0.96) to form personality impressions of unacquainted individuals (i.e., targets) from video interviews while their attentional behavior was assessed using eye tracking. We examined whether (a) attending more to targets benefited accuracy, (b) attending to specific body parts (e.g., face vs. body) drove this association, and (c) targets' ease of personality readability modulated these effects. RESULTS: Paying more attention to a target was associated with forming more accurate personality impressions. Attention to the whole person contributed to this effect, with this association occurring independently of targets' ease of readability. CONCLUSIONS: These findings show that attending more to a person is associated with increased accuracy and thus suggest that attention promotes social adaption by supporting accurate social perception.

Combined attention controls complex behavior by suppressing unlikely events.

Attention enables behavior by modulating both sensory inputs and task goals. Combining attentional resources from both of those sources exerts qualitatively large effects on manual performance. Here we tested how combined attention was represented in sensory processing, as reflected by the P1 component and associated activity in the alpha band. We measured performance and recorded EEG while participants' attention was engaged in an automated, endogenous, and combined (i.e., automated and endogenous) manner. Behavioral results replicated past reports with reliable effects of isolated automated and endogenous attention, as well as their qualitatively unique combined effect. ERP analyses indicated expected increases in P1 amplitude for validly relative to invalidly cued targets in automated and endogenous conditions. However, in the combined case, the P1 difference between validly relative to invalidly cued targets decreased. Analyses of target-locked alpha-band further revealed that this condition was associated with an increased synchrony in the alpha frequency for invalidly cued targets. This suggests that the large performance benefit observed when attentional systems combine is partly driven by suppressed processing of unexpected targets, dovetailing with the notion that in addition to increasing sensory gain of attended targets, attention may also modulate complex behavior by increasing suppression of unattended ones.

An investigation of global-local processing bias in a large sample of typical individuals varying in autism traits.

Although individuals with an autism spectrum disorder display impaired function across several social and behavioral domains, they possess intact, and often superior visual processing abilities for local relative to global aspects of their visual environment. To address whether differences in visual processing similarly vary within typical individuals as a function of their level of social competence, using the Navon hierarchical figures task, here we examined the relationship between global-local visual processing style and the number of autism-like traits in a large sample of 434 typically developed persons. In line with the existing literature, our data indicated an overall global processing bias. However, this overall visual processing style did not vary with participants' number of autism-like traits. These results suggest that the visual processing of Navon figures may be different in typical individuals vs. those with an autism spectrum disorder, with those differences potentially reflecting specific stimulus and task settings.

Glimpses into the social mind: Decoding messages from faces and eyes.

The human brain is fundamentally a social brain, with its perceptual and cognitive systems evolved to support a diverse set of processes aimed at enabling our complex social function. And while in the last decades the field has advanced considerably in understanding the mechanisms by which the perceptual and cognitive faculties support human social behaviour, there remains a lack of knowledge about how social information is communicated between individuals. In my work, I have studied nonverbal visual social signalling via faces and eyes. In this article, I summarize the results from three lines of my research which show that (a) limiting face visibility decreases its social value, (b) eyes transmit key social messages, and (c) group size modulates social messages. Together, these data show that visual signals from faces and eyes convey complex social messages and represent an important vehicle for the communication of social information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The role of visual and auditory information in social event segmentation.

Humans organise their social worlds into social and nonsocial events. Social event segmentation refers to the ability to parse the environmental content into social and nonsocial events or units. Here, we investigated the role that perceptual information from visual and auditory modalities, in isolation and in conjunction, played in social event segmentation. Participants viewed a video clip depicting an interaction between two actors and marked the boundaries of social and nonsocial events. Depending on the condition, the clip at first contained only auditory or only visual information. Then, the clip was shown containing both auditory and visual information. Higher overall group consensus and response consistency in parsing the clip was found for social segmentation and when both auditory and visual information was available. Presenting the clip in the visual domain only benefitted group agreement in social segmentation while the inclusion of auditory information (under the audiovisual condition) also improved response consistency in nonsocial segmentation. Thus, social segmentation utilises information from the visual modality, with the auditory cues contributing under ambiguous or uncertain conditions and during segmentation of nonsocial content.

Beyond the Whole: Reduced Empathy for Masked Emotional Faces Is Not Driven by Disrupted Configural Face Processing.

Sharing of emotional states is reduced for individuals wearing face coverings, but the mechanism behind this reduction remains unknown. Here, we investigated if face occlusion by masks reduces empathy by disrupting configural processing of emotional faces. Participants rated their empathy for happy and neutral faces which were presented in upright or inverted orientation and wore opaque, clear, or no face masks. Empathy ratings were reduced for masked faces (opaque or clear) as well as for inverted faces. Importantly, face inversion disrupted empathy more for faces wearing opaque masks relative to those wearing clear or no masks, which stands in contrast to the predictions generated by the classic configural processing models. We discuss these data within the context of classic and novel configural face perception models, and highlight that studying inverted occluded faces presents an informative case worthy of further investigation.

Lower empathy for face mask wearers is not explained by observer's reduced facial mimicry.

Facial occlusion alters social processes that rely on face visibility, including spontaneous mimicry of emotions. Given that facial mimicry of emotions is theorized to play an important role in how we empathize or share emotions with others, here we investigated if empathy was reduced for faces wearing masks because masks may reduce the ability to mimic facial expressions. In two preregistered experiments, participants rated their empathy for faces displaying happy or neutral emotions and wearing masks or no masks. We manipulated mimicry by either blocking mimicry with observers holding a pen in between their teeth (Experiment 1) or by producing a state of constant congruent mimicry by instructing observers to smile (Experiment 2). Results showed reduced empathy ratings for masked faces. Mimicry overall facilitated empathy, with reduced empathy ratings when mimicry was blocked and higher empathy ratings when it was instructed. However, this effect of mimicry did not vary with mask condition. Thus, while observers were impaired in sharing emotions with masked faces, this impairment did not seem to be explained by a reduction in facial mimicry. These results show that mimicry is an important process for sharing emotions, but that occluding faces with masks reduces emotion sharing via a different mechanism.

Intentional looks facilitate faster responding in observers.

Humans construct rich representations of other people's mental states. Here we investigated how intentionality in eye gaze affected perception and responses to gaze. Observers viewed videos of human gazers looking left or right. Unbeknownst to the observers, the gazers could either choose where to look (self-chosen gaze) or were explicitly instructed where to look (computer-instructed gaze). In Experiment 1, observers reported the direction of the gazer's upcoming look before the eye movement was initiated. Faster responses were found for self-chosen relative to computer-instructed gaze. In Experiments 2 and 3, observers responded by reporting the location of a peripheral target that appeared at the gazed-at or not gazed-at location. Faster responses were found for gazed-at relative to not gazed-at targets and at longer cue-target intervals for self-chosen relative to computer-instructed gaze. The examination of the eye movement kinematics indicated that self-chosen gaze shifts were marked by a larger magnitude of motion within the eye region prior to the eye movement occurring relative to computer-instructed ones. Thus, perceived intentionality in eye gaze facilitates responses in observers with the information about mental states communicated via subtle properties of eye motion.

The uniqueness of social attention revisited: working memory load interferes with endogenous but not social orienting.

It is well known that perceived eye gaze direction influences attentional orienting. However, it still remains unclear whether social orienting involves exogenous or endogenous attentional control. To address this issue, we examined if social orienting and endogenous orienting were differentially modulated by working memory load, which is known to interfere with endogenous but not exogenous attention. To do so, we manipulated eye direction as either spatially counterpredictive in Experiment 1 or spatially predictive in Experiment 2 while participants performed a cueing task either in isolation or under working memory load. We found that when social attention and endogenous attention diverged spatially in Experiment 1, social orienting elicited by gaze direction remained intact while endogenous orienting elicited by the cue's predictive meaning was suppressed under working memory load, suggesting independence between social orienting and endogenous orienting. Indeed, a comparison between the sum of isolated social orienting and endogenous orienting magnitudes from Experiment 1 relative to their combined measure from Experiment 2 confirmed that social attention and endogenous attention operated in parallel. Together, our data show that social orienting is independent from endogenous orienting and further suggest that paying attention to social information might involve either exogenous or unique attentional mechanisms.

A dual mobile eye tracking study on natural eye contact during live interactions.

Human eyes convey a wealth of social information, with mutual looks representing one of the hallmark gaze communication behaviors. However, it remains relatively unknown if such reciprocal communication requires eye-to-eye contact or if general face-to-face looking is sufficient. To address this question, while recording looking behavior in live interacting dyads using dual mobile eye trackers, we analyzed how often participants engaged in mutual looks as a function of looking towards the top (i.e., the Eye region) and bottom half of the face (i.e., the Mouth region). We further examined how these different types of mutual looks during an interaction connected with later gaze-following behavior elicited in an individual experimental task. The results indicated that dyads engaged in mutual looks in various looking combinations (Eye-to-eye, Eye-to-mouth, and Mouth-to-Mouth) but proportionately spent little time in direct eye-to-eye gaze contact. However, the time spent in eye-to-eye contact significantly predicted the magnitude of later gaze following response elicited by the partner's gaze direction. Thus, humans engage in looking patterns toward different face parts during interactions, with direct eye-to-eye looks occurring relatively infrequently; however, social messages relayed during eye-to-eye contact appear to carry key information that propagates to affect subsequent individual social behavior.

Emotional context can reduce the negative impact of face masks on inferring emotions.

While face masks prevent the spread of disease, they occlude lower face parts and thus impair facial emotion recognition. Since emotions are often also contextually situated, it remains unknown whether providing a descriptive emotional context alongside the facial emotion may reduce some of the negative impact of facial occlusion on emotional communication. To address this question, here we examined how emotional inferences were affected by facial occlusion and the availability of emotional context. Participants were presented with happy or sad emotional faces who were either fully visible or partially obstructed by an opaque surgical mask. The faces were shown either within an emotionally congruent (e.g., "Her cat was found/lost yesterday afternoon") or neutral ("Get ready to see the next person") context. Participants were asked to infer the emotional states of the protagonists by rating their emotional intensity and valence. Facial occlusion by masks impacted the ratings, such that protagonists were judged to feel less intense and more neutral emotions when they wore masks relative to when their face was fully visible. Importantly, this negative impact of visual occlusion by mask was reduced but not fully eliminated when the faces were presented within a congruent emotional context. Thus, visual occlusion of facial emotions impairs understanding of emotions, with this negative effect of face masks partially mitigated by the availability of a larger emotional context.

Infrequent faces bias social attention differently in manual and oculomotor measures.

Although attention is thought to be spontaneously biased by social cues like faces and eyes, recent data have demonstrated that when extraneous content, context, and task factors are controlled, attentional biasing is abolished in manual responses while still occurring sparingly in oculomotor measures. Here, we investigated how social attentional biasing was affected by face novelty by measuring responses to frequently presented (i.e., those with lower novelty) and infrequently presented (i.e., those with higher novelty) face identities. Using a dot-probe task, participants viewed either the same face and house identity that was frequently presented on half of the trials or sixteen different face and house identities that were infrequently presented on the other half of the trials. A response target occurred with equal probability at the previous location of the eyes or mouth of the face or the top or bottom of the house. Experiment 1 measured manual responses to the target while participants maintained central fixation. Experiment 2 additionally measured participants' natural oculomotor behaviour when their eye movements were not restricted. Across both experiments, no evidence of social attentional biasing was found in manual data. However, in Experiment 2, there was a reliable oculomotor bias towards the eyes of infrequently presented upright faces. Together, these findings suggest that face novelty does not facilitate manual measures of social attention, but it appears to promote spontaneous oculomotor biasing towards the eyes of infrequently presented novel faces.

Transparent masks reduce the negative impact of opaque masks on understanding emotional states but not on sharing them.

While face masks provide necessary protection against disease spread, they occlude the lower face parts (chin, mouth, nose) and consequently impair the ability to accurately perceive facial emotions. Here we examined how wearing face masks impacted making inferences about emotional states of others (i.e., affective theory of mind; Experiment 1) and sharing of emotions with others (i.e., affective empathy; Experiment 2). We also investigated whether wearing transparent masks ameliorated the occlusion impact of opaque masks. Participants viewed emotional faces presented within matching positive (happy), negative (sad), or neutral contexts. The faces wore opaque masks, transparent masks, or no masks. In Experiment 1, participants rated the protagonists' emotional valence and intensity. In Experiment 2, they indicated their empathy for the protagonist and the valence of their emotion. Wearing opaque masks impacted both affective theory of mind and affective empathy ratings. Compared to no masks, wearing opaque masks resulted in assumptions that the protagonist was feeling less intense and more neutral emotions. Wearing opaque masks also reduced positive empathy for the protagonist and resulted in more neutral shared valence ratings. Wearing transparent masks restored the affective theory of mind ratings but did not restore empathy ratings. Thus, wearing face masks impairs nonverbal social communication, with transparent masks able to restore some of the negative effects brought about by opaque masks. Implications for the theoretical understanding of socioemotional processing as well as for educational and professional settings are discussed.

Social attention as a general mechanism? Demonstrating the influence of stimulus content factors on social attentional biasing.

Humans spontaneously attend to faces and eyes. Recent findings, however, suggest that this social attentional biasing may not be driven by the social value of faces but by general factors, like stimulus content, visual context, or task settings. Here, we investigated whether the stimulus content factors of global luminance, featural configuration, and perceived attractiveness may independently drive social attentional biasing. Six experiments were run. In each, participants completed a dot-probe task where the presentation of a face, a house, and two neutral images was followed by the presentation of a response target at one of those locations. Experiments 1 and 2 assessed social attentional biasing when the face had higher overall global luminance. Experiments 3 and 4 assessed social attentional biasing when the face (but not the comparison house) retained the typical canonical configuration of internal features. Experiments 5 and 6 examined social attentional biasing when the face was more attractive than the house. Experiments 1, 3, and 5 measured manual responses when participants were instructed to maintain fixation. Experiments 2, 4, and 6 measured both manual and oculomotor responses when no instructions about eye movements were provided. The results indicated no reliable social attentional biasing in Experiments 1 to 5, however, a reliable saccadic bias toward the eyes of attractive upright faces was found in Experiment 6. Together, these results show that perceived facial attractiveness may be an important general factor in social attentional biasing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Intrapersonal Behavioral Coordination and Expressive Accuracy During First Impressions.

What factors influence how accurately we express our personalities? Here, we investigated the role of targets' nonverbal expressivity or the intrapersonal coordination between head and body movements. To do so, using a novel movement quantification method, we examined whether variability in a person's behavioral coordination was related to how accurately their personality was perceived by naive observers. Targets who exhibited greater variability in intrapersonal behavior coordination, indicating more expressive behavior, were perceived more accurately on high observability personality items, such as how energetic and helpful they are. Moreover, these associations held controlling for other indicators of overall movement, self- and perceiver-rated extroversion, as well as how engaging and likable targets were perceived to be. This provides preliminary evidence that variability in intrapersonal behavioral coordination may be a unique behavioral indicator of expressive accuracy, although further research that replicates these findings and examines the causal associations is needed.

Prior attentional bias is modulated by social gaze.

Focusing attention is a key cognitive skill, but how the gaze of others affects engaged attention remains relatively unknown. We investigated if participants' attentional bias toward a location is modulated by the number of people gazing toward or away from it. We presented participants with a nonpredictive directional cue that biased attention towards a specific location. Then, any number of four stimulus faces turned their gaze toward or away from the attended location. When all the faces looked at the attended location participants increased their commitment to it, and response time to targets at that location were speeded. When most or all of the faces looked away from the attended location, attention was withdrawn, and response times were slowed. This study reveals that the gaze of others can penetrate one's ability to focus attention, which in turn can be both beneficial and costly to one's responses to events in the environment.

Standing out from the crowd: Both cue numerosity and social information affect attention in multi-agent contexts.

Groups of people offer abundant opportunities for social interactions. We used a two-phase task to investigate how social cue numerosity and social information about an individual affected attentional allocation in such multi-agent settings. The learning phase was a standard gaze-cuing procedure in which a stimulus face could be either uninformative or informative about the upcoming target. The test phase was a group-cuing procedure in which the stimulus faces from the learning phase were presented in groups of three. The target could either be cued by the group minority (i.e., one face) or majority (i.e., two faces) or by uninformative or informative stimulus faces. Results showed an effect of cue numerosity, whereby responses were faster to targets cued by the group majority than the group minority. However, responses to targets cued by informative identities included in the group minority were as fast as responses to targets cued by the group majority. Thus, previously learned social information about an individual was able to offset the general enhancement of cue numerosity, revealing a complex interplay between cue numerosity and social information in guiding attention in multi-agent settings.

Trait-Level Variability in Attention Modulates Mind Wandering and Academic Achievement.

Although mind wandering remains ubiquitous in daily life, the processes that underlie and sustain this behavior remain poorly understood. Across two experiments, we studied the role of intrinsic temperament traits, which shape stable behavioral processes, in moderating the association between mind wandering and the real-life functional outcome of academic success. In Experiment 1, participants completed the Mind Wandering Questionnaire, the Adult Temperament Questionnaire, and reported their grade for the highest degree completed or in progress. Individuals with traits of low Effortful control, high Negative affect, and low Extraversion indicated more mind wandering. Effortful control moderated the relationship between mind wandering and academic success, with higher tendency for mind wandering associated with higher academic achievement for individuals with high Effortful control, and lower academic achievement for those with low Effortful control. Experiment 2 confirmed these links using the visual metronome response task, an objective measure of mind wandering. Together, these results suggest that the intrinsic temperament trait of Effortful control represents one of the key mechanisms behind the functional influence of mind wandering on real-life outcomes. This work places an innate ability to control attention at the very core of real life success, and highlights the need for studying mind wandering through an interdisciplinary lens that brings together cognitive, biological, social, and clinical theories in order to understand the fundamental mechanisms that drive this behavior.