scholarly journals Intentionally distracting: Working memory is disrupted by the perception of other agents attending to you — even without eye-gaze cues

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 951-957 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clara Colombatto ◽  
Benjamin van Buren ◽  
Brian J. Scholl
Keyword(s):  
Eye Gaze ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Gregory ◽  
Klaus Kessler

Previous research has demonstrated that older adults make limited use of social cues as compared to younger adults. This has been investigated by testing the influence of gaze cues on attentional processes, with findings showing significantly smaller gaze cuing effects for older than younger adults. Here we aimed to investigate whether this would also result in age related differences in the influence of gaze cues on working memory. We therefore tested the effects of gaze cues from realistic human avatars on working memory across two experiments using dynamic head turns and more subtle eye gaze movements. Results demonstrated that for both older and younger adults, gaze cues influenced working memory processes, though there were some important differences related to the nature of the cue. Overall, we provide important evidence that sharing attention benefits cognition across the lifespan.


2005 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 631-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew P. Bayliss ◽  
Giuseppe di Pellegrino ◽  
Steven P. Tipper

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.


2020 ◽  
pp. 026765831989682
Author(s):  
Dato Abashidze ◽  
Kim McDonough ◽  
Yang Gao

Recent research that explored how input exposure and learner characteristics influence novel L2 morphosyntactic pattern learning has exposed participants to either text or static images rather than dynamic visual events. Furthermore, it is not known whether incorporating eye gaze cues into dynamic visual events enhances dual pattern learning. Therefore, this exploratory eye-tracking study examined whether eye gaze cues during dynamic visual events facilitate novel L2 pattern learning. University students ( n = 72) were exposed to 36 training videos with two dual novel morphosyntactic patterns in pseudo-Georgian: completed events ( bich-ma kocn-ul gogoit, ‘boy kissed girl’) and ongoing actions ( bich-su kocn-ar gogoit, ‘boy is kissing girl’). They then carried out an immediate test with 24 items using the same vocabulary words, followed by a generalization test with 24 items created from new vocabulary words. Results indicated that learners who received the eye gaze cues scored significantly higher on the immediate test and relied on the verb cues more than on the noun cues. A post-hoc analysis of eye-movement data indicated that the gaze cues elicited longer looks to the correct images. Findings are discussed in relation to visual cues and novel morphosyntactic pattern learning.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 635-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis R. Manssuer ◽  
Mark V. Roberts ◽  
Steven P. Tipper

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melis Çetinçelik ◽  
Caroline F. Rowland ◽  
Tineke M. Snijders

Eye gaze is a ubiquitous cue in child–caregiver interactions, and infants are highly attentive to eye gaze from very early on. However, the question of why infants show gaze-sensitive behavior, and what role this sensitivity to gaze plays in their language development, is not yet well-understood. To gain a better understanding of the role of eye gaze in infants' language learning, we conducted a broad systematic review of the developmental literature for all studies that investigate the role of eye gaze in infants' language development. Across 77 peer-reviewed articles containing data from typically developing human infants (0–24 months) in the domain of language development, we identified two broad themes. The first tracked the effect of eye gaze on four developmental domains: (1) vocabulary development, (2) word–object mapping, (3) object processing, and (4) speech processing. Overall, there is considerable evidence that infants learn more about objects and are more likely to form word–object mappings in the presence of eye gaze cues, both of which are necessary for learning words. In addition, there is good evidence for longitudinal relationships between infants' gaze following abilities and later receptive and expressive vocabulary. However, many domains (e.g., speech processing) are understudied; further work is needed to decide whether gaze effects are specific to tasks, such as word–object mapping or whether they reflect a general learning enhancement mechanism. The second theme explored the reasons why eye gaze might be facilitative for learning, addressing the question of whether eye gaze is treated by infants as a specialized socio-cognitive cue. We concluded that the balance of evidence supports the idea that eye gaze facilitates infants' learning by enhancing their arousal, memory, and attentional capacities to a greater extent than other low-level attentional cues. However, as yet, there are too few studies that directly compare the effect of eye gaze cues and non-social, attentional cues for strong conclusions to be drawn. We also suggest that there might be a developmental effect, with eye gaze, over the course of the first 2 years of life, developing into a truly ostensive cue that enhances language learning across the board.


2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. 1420-1438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna S. Law ◽  
Stephen R. H. Langton ◽  
Robert H. Logie

2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicia Callejas ◽  
Gordon L. Shulman ◽  
Maurizio Corbetta

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (8) ◽  
pp. 2068-2083 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Caruana ◽  
Kiley Seymour ◽  
Jon Brock ◽  
Robyn Langdon

This study investigated social cognition in schizophrenia using a virtual reality paradigm to capture the dynamic processes of evaluating and responding to eye gaze as an intentional communicative cue. A total of 21 patients with schizophrenia and 21 age-, gender-, and IQ-matched healthy controls completed an interactive computer game with an on-screen avatar that participants believed was controlled by an off-screen partner. On social trials, participants were required to achieve joint attention by correctly interpreting and responding to gaze cues. Participants also completed non-social trials in which they responded to an arrow cue within the same task context. While patients and controls took equivalent time to process communicative intent from gaze shifts, patients made significantly more errors than controls when responding to the directional information conveyed by gaze, but not arrow, cues. Despite no differences in response times to gaze cues between groups, patients were significantly slower than controls when responding to arrow cues. This is the opposite pattern of results previously observed in autistic adults using the same task and suggests that, despite general impairments in attention orienting or oculomotor control, patients with schizophrenia demonstrate a facilitation effect when responding to communicative gaze cues. Findings indicate a hyper-responsivity to gaze cues of communicative intent in schizophrenia. The possible effects of self-referential biases when evaluating gaze direction are discussed, as are clinical implications.


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