The who and the where: Attention to identities and locations in groups

Abstract

While it is widely accepted that the single gaze of another person elicits shifts of attention, there is limited work on the effects of multiple gazes on attention, despite real-world social cues often occurring in groups. Further, less is known regarding the role of unequal reliability of varying social and nonsocial information on attention. We addressed these gaps by employing a variant of the gaze cueing paradigm, simultaneously presenting participants with three faces. Block-wise, we manipulated whether one face (Identity condition) or one location (Location condition) contained a gaze cue entirely predictive of target location; all other cues were uninformative. Across trials, we manipulated the number of valid cues (number of faces gazing at target). We examined whether these two types of information (Identity vs. Location) were learned at a similar rate by statistically modelling cueing effects by trial count. Preregistered analyses returned no evidence for an interaction between condition, number of valid faces, and presence of the predictive element, indicating type of information did not affect participants’ ability to employ the predictive element to alter behaviour. Exploratory analyses demonstrated (i) response times (RT) decreased faster across trials for the Identity compared with Location condition, with greater decreases when the predictive element was present versus absent, (ii) RTs decreased across trials for the Location condition only when it was completed first, and (iii) social competence altered RTs across conditions and trial number. Our work demonstrates a nuanced relationship between cue utility, condition type, and social competence on group cueing.