The influence of social and emotional context on the gaze leading orienting effect

ABSTRACT

We spontaneously orient our attention towards people whose gaze we have led (the “gaze leading” effect). Here, we investigated whether this orienting effect is sensitive to the social and emotional content of the stimuli within the interactions. Experiment 1 replicated the gaze leading effect but found no reliable influence of facial dominance or object valence. Experiment 2, where only object valence was manipulated, replicated Experiment 1. Thus, the gaze leading effect appears reliable but insensitive to the properties of the shared referent object. Experiment 3 varied only facial dominance; a marginally significant interaction indicated that attention was deployed towards high-dominant faces more than low-dominant gaze followers. Experiment 4 varied the social information relating to the social status that participants hold regarding the faces with which they interacted, but statistical support for an influence of biographical information on gaze leading was weak. Overall, the gaze leading effect appears generally reliable, and may vary when information about the individuals following our gaze is manipulated, though it is not yet fully clear which socio-evaluative features are most relevant. Future investigations may therefore require more powerful or sensitive designs to better evaluate the role of socioemotional factors and processes on this social orienting effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Shared attention
• gaze perception
• social cognition
• face perception
• emotion

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Taylor Marshall-Nichols, Adam Wren, and Daniel Schofield for assistance with data collection for Experiment 4.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

S. G. Edwards, M. Rudrum and A. P. Bayliss conceived the idea and experimental design. S. G. Edwards and M. Rudrum developed and programmed the experiments. S. G. Edwards (E3) and M. T. Rudrum (E1 and E2) collected the data. S. G. Edwards and M. Rudrum analysed the data. All authors interpreted the results. S. G. Edwards, A. P. Bayliss and K. L. McDonough wrote the paper. All authors approved the final version for submission.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Leverhulme Trust Project Grant RPG-2016-173.