The emotion of sound target modulates the auditory gaze cueing effect.

The auditory gaze cueing effect (auditory-GCE) is a faster response to auditory targets at an eye-gaze cue location than at a non-cue location. Previous research has found that auditory-GCE can be influenced by the integration of both gaze direction and emotion conveyed through facial expressions. However, it is unclear whether the emotional information of auditory targets can be cross-modally integrated with gaze direction to affect auditory-GCE. Here, we set neutral faces with different gaze directions as cues and three emotional sounds (fearful, happy, and neutral) as targets to investigate how the emotion of sound target modulates the auditory-GCE. Moreover, we conducted a controlled experiment using arrow cues. The results show that the emotional content of sound targets influences the auditory-GCE but only for those induced by facial cues. Specifically, fearful sounds elicit a significantly larger auditory-GCE compared to happy and neutral sounds, indicating that the emotional content of auditory targets plays a modulating role in the auditory-GCE. Furthermore, this modulation appears to occur only at a higher level of social meaning, involving the integration of emotional information from a sound with social gaze direction, rather than at a lower level, which involves the integration of direction and auditory emotion.

Deficiency of object-based attention specific to the gaze cue is independent of top-down attentional strategies.

This study investigated whether modes of attentional selection (location-based or object-based) are modulated by the cue type, specifically social cues such as eye gaze and pointing fingers, or by a non-social cue, such as an arrow. Earlier studies have demonstrated that the object-based attention effect was found only with arrow cues when presenting a spatial cue at either end of a rectangle: gaze cues did not yield object-based facilitation. We examined whether this deficiency of object-based attention is generalized to social cues such as pointing fingers. We measured the reaction times to the target at each cued location, an opposite side of a cued location in the same object, or the location in a different object equidistant from the cued location for each cue. Results indicated that only the gaze cue weakened the object-based attention effect, even under the condition of participants' voluntary extension of their attentional focus. The pointing cue induced sufficient object-based facilitation, as did the arrow cue. These results suggest that the deficiency of object-based attention was observed only for the gaze cue, and that it would be caused by a factor that is unique to the gaze cue, which narrows the attentional focus.

Gaze deflection reveals how gaze cueing is tuned to extract the mind behind the eyes.

Suppose you are surreptitiously looking at someone, and then when they catch you staring at them, you immediately turn away. This is a social phenomenon that almost everyone experiences occasionally. In such experiences-which we will call gaze deflection-the "deflected" gaze is not directed at anything in particular but simply away from the other person. As such, this is a rare instance where we may turn to look in a direction without intending to look there specifically. Here we show that gaze cues are markedly less effective at orienting an observer's attention when they are seen as deflected in this way-even controlling for low-level visual properties. We conclude that gaze cueing is a sophisticated mental phenomenon: It is not merely driven by perceived eye or head motions but is rather well tuned to extract the "mind" behind the eyes.

Diagnosing gaze and arrow cueing effects in unilateral spatial neglect.

Individuals with left unilateral spatial neglect (USN) following a right hemisphere lesion show difficulty in orienting their attention toward stimuli presented on the left. In normal cognition, others' gaze direction and a pointing arrow naturally guide visual attention. Here, we explore a method to identify patients who may benefit from these skills as a base for compensation during rehabilitation. We tested gaze and arrow cueing effects in 26 healthy participants and in 13 patients with USN. Our data show that brain injuries causing USN do not affect gaze and arrow cueing in a consistent manner from one patient to another.

A novel variation of the Stroop task reveals reflexive supremacy of peripheral over gaze stimuli in pro and anti saccades.

A long-standing controversy in social attention debates whether gaze-of-another induces reflexive shifts of one's own attention. In attempting to resolve this controversy, we utilized a novel Stroop task, the PAT Stroop, in which pro- and anti-saccade (PAT) responses are made to competing gaze and peripheral stimuli. The first experiment demonstrated a "Stroop effect" for peripheral stimuli, i.e. peripheral distractors interfered with gaze triggers, but gaze distractors did not interfere with peripheral triggers. These results were replicated in the second experiment, which also negated the possibility that the mere display and practice of the "clean PAT" influenced the results. Thus, the use a new PAT Stroop task demonstrated reflexive supremacy of peripheral stimuli over gaze stimuli. This novel variant of the Stroop task demonstrated similar characteristics to the classic color naming Stroop - i.e. an asymmetrical pattern, and again showed the utility and versatility of stoop-like tasks in probing mental tasks.

Neurophysiological correlates of visuospatial attention and the social dynamics of gaze processing.

The reflexive orienting response triggered by nonpredictive gaze cues is thought to be driven by a dedicated social neural network responsible for directing attention toward socially salient information. However, atypical processing of eye gaze using concomitant perceptual features has been proposed to underlie attentional orienting in groups with impairments in social cognition. Here, we examined the neurophysiological indices of visuospatial attention during a spatial cueing task, considering individual variability in social cognition in typically developing individuals, and the relative salience of social gaze and perceptual motion cues. We found enhanced neural activation to incongruent cues, wherein modulation of the N2b serves as a marker of the allocation of attention in the spatial domain. Our findings suggest the social gaze cue is less salient for those with greater autistic traits. An attentional bias toward perceptual motion cues correlated with greater social anxiety and alexithymia, and thus may reflect reduced sensitivity to social stimuli. These results provide evidence for likely neurophysiological mechanisms underlying gaze cueing and offer insight into the use of qualitatively different cognitive mechanisms used to access social information. Such paradigms provide potential insight into normative orienting responses reported in atypical groups and would benefit investigations of gaze following abilities in clinical populations.

Social-cue perception and mentalizing ability following traumatic brain injury: A human-robot interaction study.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: Research studies and clinical observations of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) indicate marked deficits in mentalizing-perceiving social information and integrating it into judgements about the affective and mental states of others. The current study investigates social-cognitive mechanisms that underlie mentalizing ability to advance our understanding of social consequences of TBI and inform the development of more effective clinical interventions. RESEARCH DESIGN: The study followed a mixed-design experiment, manipulating the presence of a mentalizing gaze cue across trials and participant population (TBI vs. healthy comparisons). METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Participants, 153 adults, 74 with moderate-severe TBI and 79 demographically matched healthy comparison peers, were asked to judge a humanoid robot's mental state based on precisely controlled gaze cues presented by the robot and apply those judgements to respond accurately on the experimental task. MAIN OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Results showed that, contrary to our hypothesis, the social cues improved task performance in the TBI group but not the healthy comparison group. CONCLUSIONS: Results provide evidence that, in specific contexts, individuals with TBI can perceive, correctly recognize, and integrate dynamic gaze cues and motivate further research to understand why this ability may not translate to day-to-day social interactions.

No experimental evidence for emotion-specific gaze cueing in a threat context.

We examined the utility of a gaze cueing paradigm to examine sensitivity to differences among negatively valenced expressions. Participants judged target stimuli (dangerous or safe), the location of which was cued by the gaze direction of a central face. Dawel et al. reported that gaze cueing effects (faster response times on valid vs. invalid trials) were larger when the central face displayed fear than when it displayed happiness. Our aim was to determine whether this effect was specific to fear, to all threat-related expressions (fear, anger), or to all negatively valenced expressions (fear, anger, sadness, disgust) with the aim of using this protocol to study the development of implicit discrimination of negatively valenced expressions. Across five experiments in which we varied the number of models (1 vs. 4), the number of expressions (2 vs. 5), and the country of residence of participants (Canada vs. Australia) we found no evidence that the magnitude of gaze cueing effects is modulated by expression. We discuss our failure to replicate in the context of the broader literature.

Attention to faces and gaze-following in social anxiety: preliminary evidence from a naturalistic eye-tracking investigation.

Social attentional biases are a core component of social anxiety disorder, but research has not yet determined their direction due to methodological limitations. Here we present preliminary findings from a novel, dynamic eye-tracking paradigm allowing spatial-temporal measurement of attention and gaze-following, a mechanism previously unexplored in social anxiety. 105 participants took part, with those high (N = 27) and low (N = 25) in social anxiety traits (HSA and LSA respectively) entered into the analyses. Participants watched a video of an emotionally-neutral social scene, where two actors periodically shifted their gaze towards the periphery. HSA participants looked more at the actors' faces during the initial 2s than the LSA group but there were no group differences in proportion of first fixations to the face or latency to first fixate the face, although HSA individuals' first fixations to the face were shorter. No further differences in eye movements were found, nor in gaze-following behaviour, although these null effects could potentially result from the relatively small sample. Findings suggest attention is biased towards faces in HSA individuals during initial scene inspection, but that overt gaze-following may be impervious to individual differences in social anxiety. Future research should seek to replicate these effects.

Gaze-Cueing With Crossed Eyes: Asymmetry Between Nasal and Temporal Shifts.

A person's direction of gaze (and visual attention) can be inferred from the direction of the parallel shift of the eyes. However, the direction of gaze is ambiguous when there is a misalignment between the eyes. The use of schematic drawings of faces in a previous study demonstrated that gaze-cueing was equally effective, even when one eye looked straight and the other eye was averted. In the current study, we used more realistic computer-generated face models to re-examine if the diverging direction of the eyes affected gaze-cueing. The condition where one eye was averted nasally while the other looked straight produced a significantly smaller gaze-cueing effect in comparison with when both eyes were averted in parallel or one eye was averted temporally. The difference in the gaze-cueing effect disappeared when the position of one eye was occluded with a rectangular surface or an eye-patch. These results highlight the possibility that the gaze-cueing effect might be weakened when a direct gaze exists between the cueing eye (i.e., nasally oriented eye) and the target and the effect magnitude might depend on which type of face stimulus are used as a cue.

In the presence of conflicting gaze cues, fearful expression and eye-size guide attention.

Humans 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 - but increased sclera exposure per se does not guide attention. The prioritisation of fearful gaze over non-emotional gaze likely represents an adaptive means of selectively attending to survival-relevant spatial locations.

Gaze-cueing requires intact face processing - Insights from acquired prosopagnosia.

Gaze-cueing is the automatic spatial orienting of attention in the direction of perceived gaze. Participants respond faster to targets located at positions congruent with the direction of gaze, compared to incongruent ones (gaze cueing effect, GCE). However, it still remains unclear whether its occurrence depends on intact integration of information from the entire eye region or face, rather than simply the presence of the eyes per se. To address this question, we investigated the GCE in PS, an extensively studied case of pure acquired prosopagnosia. In our gaze-cueing paradigm, we manipulated the duration at which cues were presented (70ms vs. 400ms) and the availability of facial information (full-face vs. eyes-only). For 70ms cue duration, we found a context-dependent dissociation between PS and controls: PS showed a GCE for eyes-only stimuli, whereas controls showed a GCE only for full-face stimuli. For 400ms cue duration, PS showed gaze-cueing independently of stimulus context, whereas in healthy controls a GCE again emerged only for full-face stimuli. Our findings suggest that attentional deployment based on the gaze direction of briefly presented faces requires intact processing of facial information, which affords salience to the eye region.

Assessing early processing of eye gaze in schizophrenia: measuring the cone of direct gaze and reflexive orienting of attention.

INTRODUCTION: The accurate discrimination of another person's eye-gaze direction is vital as it provides a cue to the gazer's focus of attention, which in turn supports joint attention. Patients with schizophrenia have shown a "direct gaze bias" when judging gaze direction. However, current tasks do not dissociate an early perceptual bias from high-level top-down effects. We investigated early stages of gaze processing in schizophrenia by measuring perceptual sensitivity to fine deviations in gaze direction (i.e., the cone of direct gaze: CoDG) and ability to reflexively orient to locations cued by the same deviations. METHODS: Twenty-four patients and 26 controls completed a CoDG discrimination task that used realistic direct-face images with six fine degrees of deviation (i.e., 3, 6 or 9 pixels to the left and right) and direct gaze, and a gaze cueing task that assessed reflexive orienting to the same fine-grained deviations. RESULTS: Our data showed patients exhibited no impairment in gaze discrimination, nor did we observe a reduced orienting response. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that while patients may suffer deficits associated with interpreting another person's gaze, the earliest processes concerned with detecting averted gaze and reflexively orienting to the gazed-at location are intact.

The appeal of the devil's eye: social evaluation affects social attention.

Humans typically exhibit a tendency to follow the gaze of conspecifics, a social attention behaviour known as gaze cueing. Here, we addressed whether episodically learned social knowledge about the behaviours performed by the individual bearing the gaze can influence this phenomenon. In a learning phase, different faces were systematically associated with either positive or negative behaviours. The same faces were then used as stimuli in a gaze-cueing task. The results showed that faces associated with antisocial norm-violating behaviours triggered stronger gaze-cueing effects as compared to faces associated with sociable behaviours. Importantly, this was especially evident for participants who perceived the presented norm-violating behaviours as far more negative as compared to positive behaviours. These findings suggest that reflexive attentional responses can be affected by our appraisal of the valence of the behaviours of individuals around us.

Intergroup threat gates social attention in humans.

Humans shift their attention to follow another person's gaze direction, a phenomenon called gaze cueing. This study examined whether a particular social factor, intergroup threat, modulates gaze cueing. As expected, stronger responses of a particular in-group to a threatening out-group were observed when the in-group, conditioned to perceive threat from one of two out-groups, was presented with facial stimuli from the threatening and non-threatening out-groups. These results suggest that intergroup threat plays an important role in shaping social attention. Furthermore, larger gaze-cueing effects were found for threatening out-group faces than for in-group faces only at the 200 ms but not the 800 ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA); the specificity of the gaze-cueing effects at the short SOA suggests that threat cues modulate the involuntary component of gaze cueing.

Domain-specific and domain-general processes in social perception--A complementary approach.

In this brief discussion, we explicate and evaluate Heyes and colleagues' deflationary approach to interpreting apparent evidence of domain-specific processes for social perception. We argue that the deflationary approach sheds important light on how functionally specific processes in social perception can be subserved at least in part by domain-general processes. On the other hand, we also argue that the fruitfulness of this approach has been unnecessarily hampered by a contrastive conception of the relationship between domain-general and domain-specific processes. As an alternative, we propose a complementary conception: the identification of domain-general processes that are engaged in instances of social perception can play a positive, structuring role by adding additional constraints to be accounted for in modelling the domain-specific processes that are also involved in such instances.

Complementary effects of gaze direction and early saliency in guiding fixations during free viewing.

Gaze direction provides an important and ubiquitous communication channel in daily behavior and social interaction of humans and some animals. While several studies have addressed gaze direction in synthesized simple scenes, few have examined how it can bias observer attention and how it might interact with early saliency during free viewing of natural and realistic scenes. Experiment 1 used a controlled, staged setting in which an actor was asked to look at two different objects in turn, yielding two images that differed only by the actor's gaze direction, to causally assess the effects of actor gaze direction. Over all scenes, the median probability of following an actor's gaze direction was higher than the median probability of looking toward the single most salient location, and higher than chance. Experiment 2 confirmed these findings over a larger set of unconstrained scenes collected from the Web and containing people looking at objects and/or other people. To further compare the strength of saliency versus gaze direction cues, we computed gaze maps by drawing a cone in the direction of gaze of the actors present in the images. Gaze maps predicted observers' fixation locations significantly above chance, although below saliency. Finally, to gauge the relative importance of actor face and eye directions in guiding observer's fixations, in Experiment 3, observers were asked to guess the gaze direction from only an actor's face region (with the rest of the scene masked), in two conditions: actor eyes visible or masked. Median probability of guessing the true gaze direction within ±9° was significantly higher when eyes were visible, suggesting that the eyes contribute significantly to gaze estimation, in addition to face region. Our results highlight that gaze direction is a strong attentional cue in guiding eye movements, complementing low-level saliency cues, and derived from both face and eyes of actors in the scene. Thus gaze direction should be considered in constructing more predictive visual attention models in the future.

Social face processing in chronic severe traumatic brain injury: Altered decoding of emotions and mental states but preserved gaze cueing of attention.

The processing of social information transmitted by facial stimuli is altered in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). This study investigated whether these alterations also affect the mechanisms underlying the orienting of visual attention in response to eye-gaze signals. TBI patients and a control group of healthy individuals matched on relevant criteria completed a spatial cueing task. In this task, a lateral visual target was presented along with a task-irrelevant face, with the gaze averted to the left or right. Arrows pointing towards the left or right were also used as non-social control stimuli. Social cognition abilities were further investigated through tests based on decoding emotional expressions and mental states conveyed by facial stimuli. The decoding of emotions and mental states was worse in the TBI group than in the control group. However, both groups demonstrated reliable and comparable orienting of attention to both eye-gaze and arrow stimuli. Despite impairments in certain aspects of social face processing among TBI patients, gaze cueing of attention appears to be preserved in this neuropsychological population.

Gaze cueing improves pattern recognition of histology learners.

Experts perceive and evaluate domain-specific visual information with high accuracy. In doing so, they exhibit eye movements referred to as "expert gaze" to rapidly focus on task-relevant areas. Using eye tracking, it is possible to record these implicit gaze patterns and present them to histology novice learners during training. This article presents a comprehensive evaluation of such expert gaze cueing on pattern recognition of medical students in histology. For this purpose, 53 students were randomized into two groups over eight histology sessions. The control group was presented with an instructional histology video featuring voice commentary. The gaze cueing group was presented the same video, but with an additional overlay of a live recording of the expert's eye movements. Afterward, students' pattern recognition was assessed through 20 image-based tasks (5 retention, 15 transfer) and their cognitive load with the Paas scale. Results showed that gaze cueing significantly outperformed the control group (p = 0.007; d = 0.40). This effect was evident for both, retention (p = 0.003) and transfer tasks (p = 0.046), and generalized across different histological contexts. The cognitive load was similar in both groups. In conclusion, gaze cueing helps histology novice learners to develop their pattern recognition skills, offering a promising method for histology education. Histology educators could benefit from this instructional strategy to provide new forms of attentional guidance to learners in visually complex learning environments.

Tuning social modulations of gaze cueing via contextual factors.

Gaze cueing reflects the tendency to shift attention toward a location cued by the averted gaze of others. This effect does not fulfill criteria for strong automaticity because its magnitude is sensitive to the manipulation of different social features. Recent theoretical perspectives suggest that social modulations of gaze cueing could further critically depend on contextual factors. In this study, we tested this idea, relying on previous evidence showing that Chinese participants are more sensitive to gazes on White than on Asian faces, likely as a consequence of differences in perceived social status. We replicated this effect when we made group membership salient by presenting faces belonging to the different ethnicities in the same block. In contrast, when faces belonging to different ethnicities were presented in separate blocks, a similar gaze-cueing effect was noted, likely because no social comparison processes were activated. These findings are consistent with the idea that social modulations are not rigid but are tuned by contextual factors.