Andrew P. Bayliss

Gaze cueing of attention : Visual attention, social cognition, and individual differences

During social interactions, peoples eyes convey a wealth of information about their direction of attention and their emotional and mental states. This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of past and current research into the perception of gaze behavior and its effect on the observer. This encompasses the perception of gaze direction and its influence on perception of the other person, as well as gaze-following behavior such as joint attention, in infant, adult, and clinical populations. Particular focus is given to the gaze-cueing paradigm that has been used to investigate the mechanisms of joint attention. The contribution of this paradigm has been significant and will likely continue to advance knowledge across diverse fields within psychology and neuroscience.

Sex differences in eye gaze and symbolic cueing of attention

Observing a face with averted eyes results in a reflexive shift of attention to the gazed-at location. Here we present results that show that this effect is weaker in males than in females (Experiment 1). This result is predicted by the ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism (Baron-Cohen, 2003), which suggests that males in the normal population should display more autism-like traits than females (e.g., poor joint attention). Indeed, participants′ scores on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Stott, Bolton, & Goodyear, 2001) negatively correlated with cueing magnitude. Furthermore, exogenous orienting did not differ between the sexes in two peripheral cueing experiments (Experiments 2a and 2b). However, a final experiment showed that using non-predictive arrows instead of eyes as a central cue also revealed a large gender difference. This demonstrates that reduced orienting from central cues in males generalizes beyond gaze cues. These results show that while peripheral cueing is equivalent in the male and female brains, the attention systems of the two sexes treat noninformative symbolic cues very differently.

Affective evaluations of objects are influenced by observed gaze direction and emotional expression.

Gaze direction signals another persons 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.

Predictive Gaze Cues and Personality Judgments Should Eye Trust You

Although following another persons gaze is essential in fluent social interactions, the reflexive nature of this gaze-cuing effect means that gaze can be used to deceive. In a gaze-cuing procedure, participants were presented with several faces that looked to the left or right. Some faces always looked to the target (predictive-valid), some never looked to the target (predictive-invalid), and others looked toward and away from the target in equal proportions (nonpredictive). The standard gaze-cuing effects appeared to be unaffected by these contingencies. Nevertheless, participants tended to choose the predictive-valid faces as appearing more trustworthy than the predictive-invalid faces. This effect was negatively related to scores on a scale assessing autistic-like traits. Further, we present tentative evidence that the “deceptive” faces were encoded more strongly in memory than the “cooperative” faces. These data demonstrate the important interactions among attention, gaze perception, facial identity recognition, and personality judgments.

Gaze and arrow cueing of attention reveals individual differences along the autism-spectrum as a function of target context

Observing averted gaze results in a reflexive shift of attention to the gazed-at location. In two experiments, participants scoring high and low on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient questionnaire (AQ; Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Skinner, Martin, & Clubley, 2001) observed arrow and gaze cues to investigate cueing effect magnitude as a function of the context in which peripheral targets could appear. While identical cueing effects were found with gaze and arrow cues, the more striking results concerned target stimuli. In Experiment 1, targets could appear on a peripheral face, or on scrambled face parts. Overall, greater cueing effects were found when the target appeared on a face. However, this face bias was only observed in participants with low AQ scores, whereas high AQ scorers oriented more to scrambled features. Experiment 2 found equal cueing to targets appearing on tools, as compared with tool parts. However, individual differences were again observed, where low AQ scorers showed larger cueing towards tools, while high scorers oriented more to scrambled parts, as in Experiment 1. These results support the idea that low AQ individuals orient strongly to objects attended by others. However, since the same results were found for arrow cues, this effect may generalize to all central cues to attention. High AQ scorers possessing many more autistic-like traits tended to orient more to scrambled shapes, perhaps reflecting a bias for orienting to local details.

Gaze cuing and affective judgments of objects: I like what you look at

When we see another person look somewhere, we automatically attend to the same location in space. Thisjoint attention emerges early in life and has a great impact on social interactions in development and in everyday adult life. The direction of another’s gaze indicates what object is of current interest, which may be the target for a subsequent action. In this study, we found that objects that are looked at by other people are liked more than objects that do not receive the attention of other people (Experiment 1). This suggests that observing averted gaze can have an impact on the affective appraisals of objects in the environment. This liking effect was absent when an arrow was used to cue attention (Experiment 2). This underlines the importance of other people’s interactions with objects for generating our own impressions of such stimuli in the world.

Cognitive Load Disrupts Implicit Theory-of-Mind Processing:

Eye movements in Sally-Anne false-belief tasks appear to reflect the ability to implicitly monitor the mental states of other individuals (theory of mind, or ToM). It has recently been proposed that an early-developing, efficient, and automatically operating ToM system subserves this ability. Surprisingly absent from the literature, however, is an empirical test of the influence of domain-general executive processing resources on this implicit ToM system. In the study reported here, a dual-task method was employed to investigate the impact of executive load on eye movements in an implicit Sally-Anne false-belief task. Under no-load conditions, adult participants displayed eye movement behavior consistent with implicit belief processing, whereas evidence for belief processing was absent for participants under cognitive load. These findings indicate that the cognitive system responsible for implicitly tracking beliefs draws at least minimally on executive processing resources. Thus, even the most low-level processing of beliefs appears to reflect a capacity-limited operation.

Gaze cueing elicited by emotional faces is influenced by affective context

When we observe someone shift their gaze to a peripheral event or object, a corresponding shift in our own attention often follows. This social orienting response, joint attention, has been studied in the laboratory using the gaze cueing paradigm. Here, we investigate the combined influence of the emotional content displayed in two critical components of a joint attention episode: The facial expression of the cue face, and the affective nature of the to-be-localized target object. Hence, we presented participants with happy and disgusted faces as cueing stimuli, and neutral (Experiment 1), pleasant and unpleasant (Experiment 2) pictures as target stimuli. The findings demonstrate an effect of ‘emotional context’ confined to participants viewing pleasant pictures. Specifically, gaze cueing was boosted when the emotion of the gazing face (i.e., happy) matched that of the targets (pleasant). Demonstrating modulation by emotional context highlights the vital flexibility that a successful joint attention system requires in order to assist our navigation of the social world.

Attention modulates motor system activation during action observation: evidence for inhibitory rebound

Perceiving another individual’s actions activates the human motor system. We investigated whether this effect is stronger when the observed action is relevant to the observer’s task. The mu rhythm (oscillatory activity in the 8- to 13-Hz band over sensorimotor cortex) was measured while participants watched videos of grasping movements. In one of two conditions, the participants had to later report how many times they had seen a certain kind of grasp. In the other condition, they viewed the identical videos but had to later report how many times they had seen a certain colour change. The colour change and the grasp always occurred simultaneously. Results show mu rhythm attenuation when watching the videos relative to baseline. This attenuation was stronger when participants later reported the grasp rather than the colour, suggesting that the motor system is more strongly activated when the observed grasping actions were relevant to the observer’s task. Moreover, when the graspable object disappeared after the offset of the video, there was subsequent mu rhythm enhancement, reflecting a post-stimulus inhibitory rebound. This enhancement was again stronger when making judgments about the grasp than the colour, suggesting that the stronger activation is followed by a stronger inhibitory rebound.

Gaze Leading: Initiating simulated joint attention influences eye movements and choice behavior

Recent research in adults has made great use of the gaze cuing paradigm to understand the behavior of the follower in joint attention episodes. We implemented a gaze leading task to investigate the initiator--the other person in these triadic interactions. In a series of gaze-contingent eye-tracking studies, we show that fixation dwell time upon and reorienting toward a face are affected by whether that individual face shifts its eyes in a congruent or an incongruent direction in response to the participants eye movement. Gaze leading also biased affective responses toward the faces and attended objects. These findings demonstrate that leading the eyes of other individuals alters how we explore and evaluate our social environment.