Folk psychological attributions of consciousness to large language models.

Technological advances raise new puzzles and challenges for cognitive science and the study of how humans think about and interact with artificial intelligence (AI). For example, the advent of large language models and their human-like linguistic abilities has raised substantial debate regarding whether or not AI could be conscious. Here, we consider the question of whether AI could have subjective experiences such as feelings and sensations ('phenomenal consciousness'). While experts from many fields have weighed in on this issue in academic and public discourse, it remains unknown whether and how the general population attributes phenomenal consciousness to AI. We surveyed a sample of US residents (n = 300) and found that a majority of participants were willing to attribute some possibility of phenomenal consciousness to large language models. These attributions were robust, as they predicted attributions of mental states typically associated with phenomenality-but also flexible, as they were sensitive to individual differences such as usage frequency. Overall, these results show how folk intuitions about AI consciousness can diverge from expert intuitions-with potential implications for the legal and ethical status of AI.

Perceived gaze dynamics in social interactions can alter (and even reverse) the perceived temporal order of events.

Here's an all-too-familiar scenario: Person A is staring at person B, and then B turns toward A, and A immediately looks away (a phenomenon we call 'gaze deflection'). Beyond perceiving lower-level properties here - such as the timing of the eye/head turns - you can also readily perceive seemingly higher-level social dynamics: A got caught staring, and frantically looked away in embarrassment! It seems natural to assume that such social impressions are based on more fundamental representations of what happened when - but here we show that social gaze dynamics are unexpectedly powerful in that they can actually alter (and even reverse) the perceived temporal order of the underlying events. Across eight experiments, observers misperceived B as turning before A, when in fact they turned simultaneously - and even when B was turning after A. Additional controls confirmed that this illusion depends on visual processing (vs. being driven solely by higher-level interpretations), and that it is specific to the perception of social agents (vs. non-social objects). This demonstrates how social perception is tightly integrated into our perceptual experience of the world, and can have powerful consequences for one of the most basic properties that we can perceive: what happens when.

Vaccine Nationalism Counterintuitively Erodes Public Trust in Leaders.

Global access to resources like vaccines is key for containing the spread of infectious diseases. However, wealthy countries often pursue nationalistic policies, stockpiling doses rather than redistributing them globally. One possible motivation behind vaccine nationalism is a belief among policymakers that citizens will mistrust leaders who prioritize global needs over domestic protection. In seven experiments (total N = 4,215 adults), we demonstrate that such concerns are misplaced: Nationally representative samples across multiple countries with large vaccine surpluses (Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and United States) trusted redistributive leaders more than nationalistic leaders-even the more nationalistic participants. This preference generalized across different diseases and manifested in both self-reported and behavioral measures of trust. Professional civil servants, however, had the opposite intuition and predicted higher trust in nationalistic leaders, and a nonexpert sample also failed to predict higher trust in redistributive leaders. We discuss how policymakers' inaccurate intuitions might originate from overestimating others' self-interest.

Unconscious pupillometry: An effect of "attentional contagion" in the absence of visual awareness.

When looking at other people, we can readily tell how attentive (or distracted) they are. Some cues to this are fairly obvious (as when someone stares intensely at you), but others seem more subtle. For example, increased cognitive load or emotional arousal causes one's pupils to dilate. This phenomenon is frequently employed as a physiological measure of arousal, in studies of pupillometry. Here, in contrast, we employ it as a stimulus for social perception. Might the human visual system be naturally and automatically engaging in "unconscious pupillometry"? We demonstrate that faces rendered invisible (through continuous flash suppression) enter awareness faster when their pupils are dilated. This cannot be explained by appeal to differential contrast, differential attractiveness, or spatial attentional biases, and the effect vanishes when the identical stimuli are presented in socially meaningless ways (e.g., as shirt buttons or facial moles). These results demonstrate that pupil dilation is prioritized in visual processing even outside the focus of conscious awareness, in a form of unconscious "attentional contagion." (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Hidden intentions: Visual awareness prioritizes perceived attention even without eyes or faces.

Eye contact is a powerful social signal, and it readily captures attention. Recent work has suggested that direct gaze is prioritized even unconsciously: faces rendered invisible via interocular suppression enter awareness faster when they look directly at (vs. away from) you. Such effects may be driven in a relatively low level way by the special visual properties of eyes, per se, but here we asked whether they might instead arise from the perception of a deeper property: being the focus of another agent's attention and/or intentions. We report five experiments which collectively explore whether visual awareness also prioritizes distinctly non-eye-like stimuli that nevertheless convey directedness. We first showed that directed (vs. averted) 'mouth' shapes also break through into awareness faster, after being rendered invisible by continuous flash suppression - a direct 'gaze' effect without any eyes. But such effects could still be specific to faces (if not eyes), so we next asked whether the prioritization of directed intentions would still occur even for stimuli that have no faces at all. In fact, even simple geometric shapes can be seen as intentional, as when numerous randomly scattered cones are all consistently pointing at you. And indeed, even such directed (vs. averted) cones entered awareness faster - a direct 'gaze' effect without any facial cues. Additional control experiments ruled out effects of both symmetry and response biases. We conclude that the perception of directed intentions is sufficient to boost objects into awareness, and that putative eye-contact effects might instead reflect more general phenomena of 'mind contact'.

The Efficiency of Demography in Face Perception.

When we look at a face, we cannot help but "read" it: Beyond simply processing its identity, we also form robust impressions of both transient psychological states (e.g., surprise) and stable character traits (e.g., trustworthiness). But perhaps the most fundamental traits we extract from faces are their social demographics, for example, race, age, and gender. How much exposure is required to extract such properties? Curiously, despite extensive work on the temporal efficiency of extracting both higher-level social properties (such as competence and dominance) and more basic characteristics (such as identity and familiarity), this question remains largely unexplored for demography. We correlated observers' percepts of the race/age/gender of unfamiliar faces viewed at several brief durations (and then masked) with their judgments after unlimited exposure. Performance reached asymptote by 100 ms, was above chance by only 33.33 ms, and had a similar temporal profile to detecting faces in the first place. This was true even when the property to be reported wasn't revealed until after the face had disappeared, and when the faces were matched for several lower-level visual properties. Collectively, these results demonstrate that the extraction of demographic features from faces is highly efficient, and can truly be done at a glance.

Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis.

Trust in leaders is central to citizen compliance with public policies. One potential determinant of trust is how leaders resolve conflicts between utilitarian and non-utilitarian ethical principles in moral dilemmas. Past research suggests that utilitarian responses to dilemmas can both erode and enhance trust in leaders: sacrificing some people to save many others ('instrumental harm') reduces trust, while maximizing the welfare of everyone equally ('impartial beneficence') may increase trust. In a multi-site experiment spanning 22 countries on six continents, participants (N = 23,929) completed self-report (N = 17,591) and behavioural (N = 12,638) measures of trust in leaders who endorsed utilitarian or non-utilitarian principles in dilemmas concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. Across both the self-report and behavioural measures, endorsement of instrumental harm decreased trust, while endorsement of impartial beneficence increased trust. These results show how support for different ethical principles can impact trust in leaders, and inform effective public communication during times of global crisis. PROTOCOL REGISTRATION STATEMENT: The Stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 13 November 2020. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13247315.v1 .

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.

Gazing Without Eyes: A "Stare-in-the-Crowd" Effect Induced by Simple Geometric Shapes.

Of the many effects that eye contact has, perhaps the most powerful is the stare-in-the-crowd effect, wherein faces are detected more readily when they look directly toward you. This is commonly attributed to others' eyes being especially salient visual stimuli, but here we ask whether stares-in-the-crowd might arise instead from a deeper property that the eyes (but not only the eyes) signify: the direction of others' attention and intentions. In fact, even simple geometric shapes can be seen as intentional, as when numerous randomly scattered cones are all consistently pointing at you. Accordingly, we show here that cones directed at the observer are detected faster (in fields of averted cones) than are cones averted away from the observer (in fields of directed cones). These results suggest that perceived intentionality itself captures attention-and that even in the absence of eyes, others' directed attention stands out in a crowd.

Intentionally distracting: Working memory is disrupted by the perception of other agents attending to you - even without eye-gaze cues.

Of all the visual stimuli you can perceive, perhaps the most important are other people's eyes. And this is especially true when those eyes are looking at you: direct gaze has profound influences, even at the level of basic cognitive processes such as working memory. For example, memory for the properties of simple geometric shapes is disrupted by the presence of other eyes gazing at you. But are such effects really specific to direct gaze per se? Seeing eyes is undoubtedly important, but presumably only because of what it tells us about the "mind behind the eyes" - i.e., about others' attention and intentions. This suggests that the same effects might arise even without eyes, as long as an agent's directed attention is conveyed by other means. Here we tested the impact on working memory of simple "mouth" shapes - which in no way resemble eyes, yet can still be readily seen as intentionally facing you (or not). Just as with gaze cues, the ability to detect changes in geometric shapes was impaired by direct (compared to averted) mouths - but not in very similar control stimuli that were not perceived as intentional. We conclude that this disruption of working memory reflects a general phenomenon of "mind contact," rather than a specific effect of eye contact.

Looking into the future: An inward bias in aesthetic experience driven only by gaze cues.

The inward bias is an especially powerful principle of aesthetic experience: In framed images (e.g. photographs), we prefer peripheral figures that face inward (vs. outward). Why does this bias exist? Since agents tend to act in the direction in which they are facing, one intriguing possibility is that the inward bias reflects a preference to view scenes from a perspective that will allow us to witness those predicted future actions. This account has been difficult to test with previous displays, in which facing direction is often confounded with either global shape profiles or the relative locations of salient features (since e.g. someone's face is generally more visually interesting than the back of their head). But here we demonstrate a robust inward bias in aesthetic judgment driven by a cue that is socially powerful but visually subtle: averted gaze. Subjects adjusted the positions of people in images to maximize the images' aesthetic appeal. People with direct gaze were not placed preferentially in particular regions, but people with averted gaze were reliably placed so that they appeared to be looking inward. This demonstrates that the inward bias can arise from visually subtle features, when those features signal how future events may unfold.

The Effects of Face Inversion and Face Race on the P100 ERP.

Research about the neural basis of face recognition has investigated the timing and anatomical substrates of different stages of face processing. Scalp-recorded ERP studies of face processing have focused on the N170, an ERP with a peak latency of ∼170 msec that has long been associated with the initial structural encoding of faces. However, several studies have reported earlier ERP differences related to faces, suggesting that face-specific processes might occur before N170. Here, we examined the influence of face inversion and face race on the timing of face-sensitive scalp-recorded ERPs by examining neural responses to upright and inverted line-drawn and luminance-matched white and black faces in a sample of white participants. We found that the P100 ERP evoked by inverted faces was significantly larger than that evoked by upright faces. Although this inversion effect was statistically significant at 100 msec, the inverted-upright ERP difference peaked at 138 msec, suggesting that it might represent an activity in neural sources that overlap with P100. Inverse modeling of the inversion effect difference waveform suggested possible neural sources in pericalcarine extrastriate visual cortex and lateral occipito-temporal cortex. We also found that the inversion effect difference wave was larger for white faces. These results are consistent with behavioral evidence that individuals process the faces of their own races more configurally than faces of other races. Taken together, the inversion and race effects observed in the current study suggest that configuration influences face processing by at least 100 msec.