The Effect Of Visual Cues To The Social Attention In Different Attention Conditions

In our daily life, people always intentional or incidental put their attention tosomething that other people are interesting, the intuition that we care about theattentional states of others has led to the birth of research in social attention. Currently,researches on the social psychology of attention became a hot spot. These researchesinvolved the social attention shift that triggered by different visual cues are mainlyabout social cues and symbolic cues. At the same time, eye gaze, as an importantsocial cue, which plays an important role in human social communication, and even inhumour being’s survival or development. It can help people effectively predict thedirection of the gaze from others’, people even can learn the focus of other’s attention,behavioral intent, purpose desire, knowledge and beliefs or other information by theeyes gaze of others’ direction.Since the study of social attention, researches in this area had a fruitfulachievement. A lot of these studies have now confirmed that the social attention haveplayed an important role in our human life. With the deepening of these studies, theresearchers have put forward different views and perspectives to social attention. Andmost researchers believed that social attention shift was affected by the socialstimulation of others, such as the attributes of cues, the cues presentation time, theindividual differences. However, eye gaze is generally considered a special socialattention cue in transferring social attention, which triggered reflective, automaticattention shift. The study adopted Posner cueing paradigm to investigate whetherthere are significant differences among different central cues on response speed andaccuracy? The study involved four central cues and two periphery cues as visual cuesto investigate its role in the transferring of social attention.Two parts were included in this study. In the first part, different levels ofattention were used to test the attention shifts circumstances of subject’s. In theexperiment, whether the target appearanced in the fixation point that representeddifferent levels of attention, subjects’ attention shift were tested by giving differentproportions of attention, which is a2(attention level: with attention, without attention)×2(target type: circle, face) experiment design. The target stimulus is thecircle or face. The individuals are asked to press the key button when they detectedthe targets.It included two experiments in the second part. In the first experiment, the effectsof different visual cues were investigated under the condition of the central cues,which experiments used a4(cue type: eye gaze, finger, arrow, word)×2(cue-targetconsistency: consistent, inconsistent)×3(SOA:100ms,300ms,800ms) design. Thereare four different central cues in the experiment, and the cues were shown in differenttime interval so that to examine the differences between cueing effects. The targetstimuli were still the pentagram or heart-shaped, the individuals must press thecorresponding button as quickly and accurately as possible.In the second experiment, the effect of different social visual cues was tested inthe conditions of peripheral cue. The experiment was a2(cue type: eye gaze, flashingring)×2(cue-target consistency: consistent, inconsistent)×3(SOA:100ms,300ms,800ms) design. The experimental procedure was almost the same as experiment1, butthe visual cues were presented at the two sides of the screen.Based on the above results and discussion, the following conclusions can bedrawn from this study:(1) Under the different levels of attention, the subjects’ social attention shift hada significant difference. Specifically, there was a more quickly attention shift in thecondition of without attention information than within attention information;(2) Under the central cue conditions, different types of visual cue had asignificant influence on social attention shift, eye gaze cueing effect was better thanother types of cue, which suggested that eye gaze cue played a special role in thesocial attention shift, the attention shift which triggered by eye gaze is automaticallyand without conscious control;(3) According to the cue-target consistency, we found that when the target isappeared consistent with the cue pointing direction, the reaction time of subjects wasfaster and when it appeared in contrast with the cue pointing direction. There was asignificant difference between consistent and inconsistent conditions; (4) Under the periphery of the visual cues, there was a notable difference existedin the cue type value. Eye gaze direction leads to a better promotion for socialattention shift than the circle cue, which reflected the uniqueness of eye gaze;(5) Accordingly, no matter how, the central and peripheral cue were reflected afacilitating effect on social attention shift;(6) The subjects’ attention shift to the cues are affected by SOA of the visual cuepresence. When the SOA greater than300ms, eye gaze cue indicated the presence ofinhibition of return.