Look into my eyes: Gaze direction and person memory

The current research considered the effects of gaze direction on a fundamental aspect of social cogition: person memory. It was anticipated that a person's direction of gaze (i.e., direct or averted) would impact his or her subsequent memorability, such that recognition would be enhanced for targets previously displaying direct gaze. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with faces displaying either direct or averted gaze in a person‐classification (i.e., conceptual) task. Then, in a surprise memory test, they were required to report whether a presented face had been seen before. As expected, a recognition advantage was observed for targets displaying direct gaze during the initial classification task. This finding was replicated and extended in a second experiment in which participants initially reported the spatial location (i.e., perceptual task) of each face. We consider the implications of these findings for basic aspects of social‐cognitive functioning and person perception.     

Fixation instruction influences gaze cueing

Studies have shown that perceiving another person's gaze shift facilitates responses in the direction of the perceived gaze shift. While it is often assumed that participants in these experiments remain fixated on the cue in the cueing interval, eye gaze is not always recorded to confirm this. The data presented here suggest that the effect of gaze cues on responses to peripheral targets depends on whether participants make eye movements prior to the onset of the target. Participants who were required to fixate showed cueing effects at short cue-target intervals, but no cueing at later intervals. Participants who could look around, often chose to do so, and showed the same positive cueing effects at the shorter interval, but negative cueing effects (suggestive of inhibition of return) at the longer interval.     

Examining the durability of incidentally learned trust from gaze cues

In everyday interactions we find our attention follows the eye gaze of faces around us. As this cueing is so powerful and difficult to inhibit, gaze can therefore be used to facilitate or disrupt visual processing of the environment, and when we experience this we infer information about the trustworthiness of the cueing face. However, to date no studies have investigated how long these impressions last. To explore this we used a gaze-cueing paradigm where faces consistently demonstrated either valid or invalid cueing behaviours. Previous experiments show that valid faces are subsequently rated as more trustworthy than invalid faces. We replicate this effect (Experiment 1) and then include a brief interference task in Experiment 2 between gaze cueing and trustworthiness rating, which weakens but does not completely eliminate the effect. In Experiment 3, we explore whether greater familiarity with the faces improves the durability of trust learning and find that the effect is more resilient with familiar faces. Finally, in Experiment 4, we push this further and show that evidence of trust learning can be seen up to an hour after cueing has ended. Taken together, our results suggest that incidentally learned trust can be durable, especially for faces that deceive.     

Gaze cueing as a function of perceived gaze direction

Previous studies have found that attention is automatically oriented in the direction of other people's gaze. This study directly investigated whether the perceiving gaze direction modulates the orienting of observers' attention. Gaze perception was manipulated by changing the face context (head orientation) of the gaze cue: the perceived gaze angle was increased (or decreased) when the head and gaze are congruent (or incongruent), while the local‐feature information of the eye region was preserved for all stimuli. The results showed that gaze‐cueing effects were enhanced when the perceived gaze direction was averted more toward left or right, and reduced when the perceived gaze direction was closer to direct gaze. The results suggest that gaze‐cueing effects are based on mechanisms specialized for gaze perception, and the magnitude of gaze‐cueing effects was probably a function of the perceived gaze direction.     

Fearful faces drive gaze‐cueing and threat bias effects in children on the lookout for danger

Most developmental studies of face emotion processing show faces in isolation, in the absence of any broader context. Here we investigate two types of interactions between expression and threat contexts. First, in adults, following of another person's direction of social attention is increased when that person shows fear and the context requires vigilance for danger. We investigate whether this also occurs in children. Using a Posner‐style eye‐gaze cueing paradigm, we tested whether children would show greater gaze‐cueing from fearful than happy expressions when the task was to be vigilant for possible dangerous animals. Testing across the 8–12‐year‐old age range, we found this fear priority effect was absent in the youngest children but developed to reach adult levels in the oldest children. However, even the oldest children were unable to sustain fear‐prioritization when the onset of the target was delayed. Second, we addressed the development of ‘threat bias’ – namely faster identification of dangerous animals than safe animals – in the social context provided by expressive faces. In our non‐anxious samples (i.e. with typical‐population levels of anxiety), adults showed a threat bias regardless of the expression or looking direction of the just‐seen cue face whereas 8–12‐year‐olds only showed a threat bias when the just‐seen cue face displayed fear. Overall, the results argue that some, but not all, aspects of expression–context interactions are mature by 12 years of age.     

Inferring task performance and confidence from displays of eye movements

Eye movements reveal what is at the center of people's attention, which is assumed to coincide with what they are thinking about. Eye-movement displays (visualizations of a person's fixations superimposed onto the stimulus, for example, as dots or circles) might provide useful information for diagnosing that person's performance. However, making inferences about a person's task performance based on eye-movement displays requires substantial interpretation. Using graph-comprehension tasks, we investigated to what extent observers (N = 46) could make accurate inferences about a performer's multiple-choice task performance (i.e., chosen answer), confidence, and competence from displays of that person's eye movements. Observers' accuracy when judging which answer the performer chose was above chance level and was higher for displays reflecting confident performance. Observers were also able to infer performers' confidence from the eye-movement displays; moreover, their own task performance and perceived similarity with the performer affected their judgments of the other's competence.     

Automatic Mechanisms for Social Attention Are Culturally Penetrable

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom‐up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top‐down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations between those individuals. We administered a multi‐gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture.     

Deceptive Strategic Identity Support: Misrepresentation of Information to Protect Another Individual's Public Self‐Image1

Two laboratory studies identified conditions under which individuals are willing to misrepresent information regarding another person's performance to protect that other person's public self‐image (i.e., to provide deceptive strategic identity support). The extent to which deceptive strategic identity support arises is determined by the salience of another person's need for impression‐management assistance. Factors increasing the salience of a person in need (including performance discrepancy, relationship closeness, location of the target, and trait empathy) motivated individuals' willingness to engage in deceptive strategic identity support. State empathy was found to mediate the effects.     

Absolute Versus Tentative Interpretations: Mediating Effects of Client Locus of Control

An analog design was used to investigate the mediating effects of client locus of control (i.e., an internal focus or external focus) on perceptions of counselor style of interpreting events (i.e., absolute or tentative interpretations) on measures of perceived session depth and smoothness, and perceived counselor expertness, attractiveness, and trustworthiness. One hundred and thirty-four undergraduate college students, crossed on level of locus of control, were randomly assigned to one of two treatment conditions, and then completed measures of perceived session depth and smoothness, as well as perceived counselor expertness, attractiveness, and trustworthiness. Results indicated a significant interaction effect on perceived counselor trustworthiness. Implications for college counselors are provided.     

Social Beliefs and Visual Attention: How the Social Relevance of a Cue Influences Spatial Orienting

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.     

Incidental learning of trust from eye-gaze: Effects of race and facial trustworthiness

Humans rapidly make inferences about individuals’ trustworthiness on the basis of their facial features and perceived group membership. We examine whether incidental learning about trust from shifts in gaze direction is influenced by these facial features. To do so, we examined two types of face category: the race of the face and the initial trustworthiness of the face based on physical appearance. We find that cueing of attention by eye-gaze is unaffected by race or initial levels of trust, whereas incidental learning of trust from gaze behaviour is selectively influenced. That is, learning of trust is reduced for other-race faces, as predicted by reduced abilities to identify members of other races (Experiment 1). In contrast, converging findings from an independently gathered set of data showed that the initial trustworthiness of faces did not influence learning of trust (Experiment 2). These results show that learning about the behaviour of other-race faces is poorer than for own-race faces, but that this cannot be explained by differences in the perceived trustworthiness of different groups.     

Observing shared attention modulates gaze following

Humans’ tendency to follow others’ gaze is considered to be rather resistant to top-down influences. However, recent evidence indicates that gaze following depends on prior eye contact with the observed agent. Does observing two people engaging in eye contact also modulate gaze following? Participants observed two faces looking at each other or away from each other before jointly shifting gaze to one of two locations. Targets appeared either at the cued location or at the non-cued location. In three experiments gaze cueing effects (faster responses to objects appearing at the cued location) were found only when the two faces had looked at each other before shifting gaze. In contrast, no effects of gaze following were observed when the two faces had looked away from each other. Thus, the attentional relation between observed people modulates whether their gaze is followed.     

Abstract: Within-Person Processes Leading to Quarrelsome Behavior in Interactions Between Romantic Partners

This study used multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM; Preacher, Zyphur, &; Zhang, 2010) to examine within-person processes that give rise to quarrelsome behavior in interactions between romantic partners. Based on Interpersonal Theory and Adult Attachment Theory, we hypothesized that a person's quarrelsome behavior would be predicted by (a) the direct effect of the partner's quarrelsome behavior, (b) an indirect effect mediated by the person's perceptions of the partner's quarrelsome behavior, and (c) an indirect effect mediated by the person's felt security. Using an event-contingent recording methodology, both partners in 93 cohabiting community couples reported independently on their quarrelsome behavior, felt security, and perceptions of the partner's quarrelsome behavior in interactions with each other during a 20-day period. Findings (see Figure 1) supported a direct effect of partner's increases in quarrelsome behavior on person's increases in quarrelsome behavior. This association was partly accounted for by perceptions of partner's behavior and felt security following these perceptions. The more a person perceived the partner as engaging in quarrelsome behavior, the more the person engaged in quarrelsome behavior [indirect effect = .016, 95% CI (.009 ? .022)]. Furthermore, the person's perception of greater quarrelsomeness in the partner's behavior was associated with decreases in the person's felt security, which in turn were related to increases in a person's quarrelsome behavior [indirect effect = .009, 95% CI (.005 ? .013)]. No gender differences were found. Findings indicate that a partner's increase in quarrelsome behavior is partly related to a person's increase in quarrelsome behavior in part to the extent that the person perceives the behavior as quarrelsome and consequently feels insecure during the interaction. Findings illustrate an application of MSEM for assessing multilevel mediation in the dyadic context. Moreover, the results suggest that theory and therapeutic interventions should consider interpersonal perceptions as the first link in the chain of affective and behavioral reactions to the interpersonal behaviors of others.     

A boy primed Sue: feature‐based processing and person construal

Everyday social interaction is often dominated by categorical thinking, with generic group‐based knowledge structures guiding people's dealings with others. Noting the important influence that category‐cueing facial features exert during the initial stages of person construal, the current work explored the effects of hair cues on the process and temporal dynamics of sex categorization. Using a standard priming paradigm to index the products of person construal (i.e., categorical and stereotype‐ based knowledge), the results of three experiments revealed that: (i) hair cues alone are sufficient to trigger category and stereotype activation; and (ii) during the early stages of person perception, these cues have the capacity to reverse conventional priming effects and generate errors of categorical assignment (e.g., female faces prime male knowledge). These findings are considered in the context of contemporary accounts of person construal. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reflexive orienting in response to short- and long-duration gaze cues in young,young-old,and old-old adults

Shifting visual focus on the basis of the perceived gaze direction of another person is one form of joint attention. In the present study, we investigated whether this socially relevant form of orienting is reflexive and whether it is influenced by age. Green and Woldorff (Cognition 122:96–101, 2012) argued that rapid cueing effects (i.e., faster responses to validly than to invalidly cued targets) were limited to conditions in which a cue overlapped in time with a target. They attributed slower responses following invalid cues to the time needed to resolve the incongruent spatial information provided by the concurrently presented cue and target. In the present study, we examined the orienting responses of young (18–31 years), young-old (60–74 years), and old-old (75–91 years) adults following uninformative central gaze cues that overlapped in time with the target (Exp. 1) or that were removed prior to target presentation (Exp. 2). When the cue and target overlapped, all three groups localized validly cued targets more quickly than invalidly cued targets, and validity effects emerged earlier for the two younger groups (at 100 ms post-cue-onset) than for the old-old group (at 300 ms post-cue-onset). With a short-duration cue (Exp. 2), validity effects developed rapidly (by 100 ms) for all three groups, suggesting that validity effects resulted from reflexive orienting based on the gaze cue information rather than from cue–target conflict. Thus, although old-old adults may be slow to disengage from persistent gaze cues, attention continues to be reflexively guided by gaze cues late in life.     

Dynamic emotional messages differentially affect 6-month-old infants’ attention to eyes and gaze cues

Infants often experience interactions in which caregivers use dynamic messages to convey their affective and communicative intent. These dynamic emotional messages may shape the development of emotion discrimination skills and shared attention by influencing infants’ attention to internal facial features and their responses to eye gaze cues. However, past research examining infants’ responses to emotional faces has predominantly focused on classic, stereotyped expressions (e.g., happy, sad, angry) that may not reflect the variability that infants experience in their daily interactions. The present study therefore examined forty-two 6-month-old infants’ attention to eyes vs. mouth and gaze cueing responses across multiple dynamic emotional messages that are common to infant-directed interactions. Overall, infants looked more to the eyes during messages with negative affect, but this increased attention to the eyes during these message conditions did not directly facilitate gaze cueing. Infants instead showed reliable gaze cueing only after messages with positive and neutral affect. We additionally observed gender differences in infants’ attention to internal face features and subsequent gaze cueing responses. Female infants spent more time looking at the eyes during the dynamic emotional messages and showed increased initial orienting and longer looking to gaze-cued objects following positive messages, whereas male infants showed these gaze cueing effects following neutral messages. These results suggest that variability in caregivers' communication can shape infants’ attention to and processing of emotion and gaze information.     

Spatial cueing by social versus nonsocial directional signals

A cost-benefit analysis was used to investigate whether reflexive effects in a spatial cueing task are stronger when target location is cued by another person's gaze rather than arrows because the relative contribution of attentional shifts versus automatic priming is greater in the case of gaze cues. Across four experiments, nonpredictive arrows triggered rapid facilitatory, inhibition-less priming that peaked at 300-500ms SOA and then died away; across three experiments, nonpredictive gaze cues triggered facilitation-plus-costs at SOAs of 300-400ms or more, suggesting that gaze cues trigger stronger (and longer) attentional effects. At 200 ms SOA, gaze cues triggered facilitation-without-cost, consistent with the view that facilitatory effects accrue more rapidly due to earlier automatic priming, whereas costs are manifest slightly later, when attentional effects come online. There was some evidence that nonpredictive gaze cues trigger long-lasting congruency effects so long as observers maintain their preparedness to respond. Findings support the view that gaze is a unique symbolic directional cue.     

Physical self-similarity enhances the gaze-cueing effect

Important social information can be gathered from the direction of another person's gaze, such as their intentions and aspects of the environment that are relevant to those intentions. Previous work has examined the effect of gaze on attention through the gaze-cueing effect: an enhancement of performance in detecting targets that appear where another person is looking. The present study investigated whether the physical self-similarity of a face could increase its impact on attention. Self-similarity was manipulated by morphing participants' faces with those of strangers. The effect of gaze direction on target detection was strongest for faces morphed with the participant's face. The results support previous work suggesting that self-similar faces are processed differently from dissimilar faces. The data also demonstrate that a face's similarity to one's own face influences the degree to which that face guides our attention in the environment.     

Contrast polarity of eyes modulates gaze‐cueing effect1

Two experiments using a modified Posner‐type visual cueing paradigm tested the prediction that detecting the darker region of the eyes of another's gaze triggers a reflexive orienting of the observer in the direction of the gaze. A target was presented in the left or right visual‐field following a gaze‐cue with positive or negative‐image polarity (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, the polarity of the eyes was manipulated independently of the negative polarity of the face (eye‐positive or eye‐negative‐image polarity conditions). The results showed that the response to the target presented at the side the eyes gazed toward was faster than for the target presented at the other side in the positive polarity condition (Experiment 1), whereas, in the negative polarity condition, the gaze‐cuing effect was not found. In Experiment 2, in the eye‐negative condition, a reversed gaze‐cueing effect appeared, whereas in the eye‐positive polarity condition, a typical gaze‐cueing effect was obtained. These findings suggested that the reflexive orienting of the observer shifts toward the position indicated by the darker region of the other's eyes.     

Power and Gender Influences on Responsibility Attributions: The Case of Disagreements in Relationships

Abstract

In a sample of 156 college students (74 men and 82 women), the authors examined the influences of power status and gender on responsibility attributions and resolution choices during disagreements in personal relationships. The participants read vignettes in which relationship partners disagreed; then the participants placed themselves in the situations depicted and reported their perceived responsibility and resolution choices. The participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 power-status conditions (you have/your partner has greater power in the situation). Power status was based on resource power (i.e., a monetary inheritance) or on perceived power (i.e., financial knowledge). The authors tested 2 alternative power-status hypotheses (justified benefits/rights and ability/accountability) and 1 gender hypothesis. The results supported both power-status hypotheses. In addition, the men's and the women's responsibility attributions and resolution choices (i.e., adhering to their own wishes or deferring to their partner's wishes) revealed differential dependence on the type of power held by the person with greater situational power. The authors suggest issues further research concerning how situational differences in socially based expectations (e.g., power status and gender) may affect conflicts within relationships.