The appeal of the devil’s eye: social evaluation affects social attention

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• 作者：Luciana Carraro ; Mario Dalmaso ; Luigi Castelli ; Giovanni Galfano…
• 关键词：Visual attention ; Episodic learning ; Gaze cueing ; Social cognition
• 刊名：Cognitive Processing
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：February 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：18
• 期：1
• 页码：97-103
• 全文大小：
• 刊物主题：Neurosciences; Behavioral Sciences; Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics);
• 出版者：Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• ISSN：1612-4790
• 卷排序：18

文摘

Humans typically exhibit a tendency to follow the gaze of conspecifics, a social attention behaviour known as gaze cueing. Here, we addressed whether episodically learned social knowledge about the behaviours performed by the individual bearing the gaze can influence this phenomenon. In a learning phase, different faces were systematically associated with either positive or negative behaviours. The same faces were then used as stimuli in a gaze-cueing task. The results showed that faces associated with antisocial norm-violating behaviours triggered stronger gaze-cueing effects as compared to faces associated with sociable behaviours. Importantly, this was especially evident for participants who perceived the presented norm-violating behaviours as far more negative as compared to positive behaviours. These findings suggest that reflexive attentional responses can be affected by our appraisal of the valence of the behaviours of individuals around us.