The Effect Of Threatening Facial Information On Gaze Cueing

Gaze cueing refers to humans' ability to shift their attention by adjusting their eye gaze in the direction of others.This fundamental behavior reflects orienting of social attention and is a forerunner to the development of more complex social capacities.Friesen and Kingstone(1998)introduced gaze cues based on research using the cue-target paradigm,and created the classical gaze cueing paradigm.In a gaze-cueing task,the response time is shorter for the gazed-at target(congruent condition)than the non-gazed-at target(incongruent condition),and this phenomenon is known as the gaze cueing effect.Gaze cueing is sensitive to threats from both visual and socio-cognitive cues of faces.Previous studies have shown a GCE increase with angry compared to neutral and/or happy faces.As the other visual cue associated with threat,dominance also showed a similar effect that people followed the eyes of threatening masculine faces more than feminine ones.Coincidentally,threatening social information,such as high social status and threatening outgroup,made people pay more attention to them and followed their eyes.It can be seen that both threatening visual and social information of faces may enhance the gaze cueing.Although individuals have an automatic assessment system that detects the importance of the output of the perception system which makes stimuli with threat characteristics are processed preferentially,all information on the face is not necessarily processed compulsively.According to the structure-reference hypothesis,there is a potential structure in a face,which determines that the face will express emotions in a special way.Therefore,identity is easier to distinguish than expression.Identity recognition relies more on configuration processing,and expression recognition relies more on feature processing,while configuration processing is the basis of feature processing.So the identity information that depends on configuration processing may be processed faster than the facial expression information that depends on feature processing.When the attention resources are limited,individuals may be able to identify faces with threatening social information like identity information quickly,and still follow their eyes more closely,while threatening visual information like facial expression may be regulated by attention resources.Four experiments were conducted to explore the effect of threatening facial information on gaze cueing.Facial familiarity was used as social information,and the expression was used as facial visual information in Experiment 1.In order to eliminate the interference of personal relationship and emotional connection,Experiment 2 strictly operated the familiarity of the face by used a learning phase.The results of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 showed that both visual and social threat of the face enhanced the individual's gaze cueing,and faces with combined threats were more likely to enhance the GCE than faces with single threat.However,it is not clear whether the effects of threatening social information and threatening visual information on gaze cueing are different.In view of the social status,group identity and familiarity of faces all belong to identity information,In Experiment 3,we used identity information as social cues to compare the effect of different threatening information on gaze cueing.The results showed that the GCE of double threat faces was significantly greater than that of non-threat faces and threatening visual information faces,but there was no significant difference with threatening social information faces.In order to further prove the processing advantages of threatening social information in gaze cueing,we examined the processing characteristics of threat facial information in gaze cueing by manipulating the change of perceptual load in Experiment 4.The results showed that: at the low load condition,it did not show the processing advantage of threatening social information;however,at the high load condition,the faces with only threatening social information enhanced the gaze cueing for male.While for female,the effects of threats on gaze cueing disappeared.In conclusion,these results revealed that for male,the threatening social information was processed preferentially and not easily affected by perceptual load.For female,processing of both two kinds of threat was modulated by the attention resource.This study clarified the effect and the processing characteristics of threatening facial information on gaze cueing,which will help to understand the law of behavioral response for individuals' interaction,and help to measure the social cognitive ability of individuals processing the threatening information in the future.