Gaze-induced joint attention persists under high perceptual load and does not depend on awareness.

Eye gaze is a powerful cue for orienting attention in space. Studies examining whether gaze and symbolic cues recruit the same neural mechanisms have found mixed results. We tested whether there is a specialized attentional mechanism for social cues. We separately measured BOLD activity during orienting and reorienting attention following predictive gaze and symbolic cues. Results showed that gaze and symbolic cues exerted their influence through the same neural networks but also produced some differential modulations. Dorsal frontoparietal regions in left intraparietal sulcus IPS and bilateral MT+/lateral occipital cortex only showed orienting effects for symbolic cues, whereas right posterior IPS showed larger validity effects following gaze cues. Both exceptions may reflect the greater automaticity of gaze cues: Symbolic orienting may require more effort, while disengaging attention during reorienting may be more difficult following gaze cues. Face-selective regions, identified with a face localizer, showed selective activations for gaze cues reflecting sensory processing but no attentional modulations. Therefore, no evidence was found linking face-selective regions to a hypothetical, specialized mechanism for orienting attention to gaze cues. However, a functional connectivity analysis showed greater connectivity between face-selective regions and right posterior IPS, posterior STS, and inferior frontal gyrus during gaze cueing, consistent with proposals that face-selective regions may send gaze signals to parts of the dorsal and ventral frontoparietal attention networks. Finally, although the default-mode network is thought to be involved in social cognition, this role does not extend to gaze orienting as these regions were more deactivated following gaze cues and showed less functional connectivity with face-selective regions during gaze cues.

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Dorsal and ventral attention systems underlie social and symbolic cueing

Driving is a complex task that relies on manual, cognitive, visual and social skill. The social demands of driving may be challenging for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) due to known social impairments. This study investigated how drivers with ASD respond to social (e.g., pedestrians) and non-social (e.g., vehicles) hazards in a driving simulator compared to typically developing drivers. Overall, participants responded faster to social hazards than non-social hazards. It was also found that drivers with typical development reacted faster to social hazards, while drivers with ASD showed no difference in reaction time to social versus non-social hazards. Future work should further investigate how social impairments in ASD may affect driving safety.

/pdf/social-and-non-social-hazard-response-in-drivers-with-autism-1vloiuwgep.pdf

Social and Non-social Hazard Response in Drivers with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

It has become widely accepted that the direction of another individual's eye gaze induces rapid, automatic, attentional orienting, due to it being such a vital cue as to where in our environment we should attend. This automatic orienting has also been associated with the directional-arrow cues used in studies of spatial attention. Here, we present evidence that the response-time cueing effects reported for spatially non-predictive gaze and arrow cues are not the result of rapid, automatic shifts of attention. For both cue types, response-time effects were observed only for long-duration cue and target stimuli that overlapped temporally, were largest when the cues were presented simultaneously with the response-relevant target, and were driven by a slowing of responses for invalidly cued targets rather than speeding for validly cued ones. These results argue against automatic attention-orienting accounts and support a novel spatial-incongruency explanation for a whole class of rapid behavioral cueing effects.

/pdf/resolving-conflicting-views-gaze-and-arrow-cues-do-not-51vqabdqma.pdf

Resolving conflicting views: Gaze and arrow cues do not trigger rapid reflexive shifts of attention

Gaze cues are used alongside language to communicate. Lab-based studies have shown that people reflexively follow gaze cue stimuli, however it is unclear whether this affect is present in real interactions. Language specificity influences the extent to which we utilize gaze cues in real interactions, but it is unclear whether the type of language used can similarly affect gaze cue utilization. We aimed to (a) investigate whether automatic gaze following effects are present in real-world interactions, and (b) explore how gaze cue utilization varies depending on the form of concurrent language used. Wearing a mobile eye-tracker, participants followed instructions to complete a real-world search task. The instructor varied the determiner used (featural or spatial) and the presence of gaze cues (absent, congruent, or incongruent). Congruent gaze cues were used more when provided alongside featural references. Incongruent gaze cues were initially followed no more than chance. However, unlike participants in the no-gaze condition, participants in the incongruent condition did not benefit from receiving spatial instructions over featural instructions. We suggest that although participants selectively use informative gaze cues and ignore unreliable gaze cues, visual search can nevertheless be disrupted when inherently spatial gaze cues are accompanied by contradictory verbal spatial references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved). Language: en

Xue Gu

Papers

Social orienting: reflexive versus voluntary control.