Why we Should Not Forget About the Non-social World: Subjective Preferences, Exploratory Eye-movements, and Individual Differences

Why we Should Not Forget About the Non-social World: Subjective Preferences, Exploratory Eye-movements, and Individual Differences David W. -L. Wu (david.wl.wu@gmail.com) Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada Tanya Jakobsen (tanya.jakobsen@psych.ubc.ca) Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada Nicola C. Anderson (n.c.c.anderson@vu.nl) Department of Cognitive Psychology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Walter F. Bischof (wfb@ualberta.ca) Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada Alan Kingstone (alan.kingstone@ubc.ca) Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada Abstract We investigated both subjective and objective differences in viewing non-social versus social scenes. Specifically, we examined four related questions: 1) Do participants prefer non-social or social scenes? 2) Are there differences in subjective exploration of non-social and social scenes? 3) Are there differences in objective exploration of these scenes? 4) Does a non-social trait – connection to nature – influence the extent of non-social scene exploration? Experiment 1 found, surprisingly, that participants prefer non-social over social scenes, and correspondingly, they reported exploring these scenes more. Experiment 2 used eye- tracking to test the validity of this introspection and confirmed that participants explore non-social scenes more than social scenes. We also discovered that connection to nature selectively modulates exploration of non-social scenes, demonstrating a critical interaction between observer and scene characteristics in the deployment of spatial attention. Keywords: eye-tracking; exploration; differences; subjective experience. attention; individual Introduction The desire to understand how attention is guided in the real social world has increased the use of eye movement tracking in complex natural environments. Accordingly, there has been a growing interest in the role that social stimuli play in the allocation of human attention and eye movements (for a recent review see Risko, Laidlaw, Freeth, Foulsham, & Kingstone, 2012). However, this leaves a pertinent question unanswered: what role, if any, do non- social stimuli play in the allocation of attention in real world scenes? Recent evidence indicates that when social and non-social scenes are put in direct competition, there is a distinct preference to look at social scenes, and particularly, at the eyes of the people in the social scenes (Fletcher-Watson, Findlay, Leekam, & Benson, 2008; Birmingham, Bischof, & Kingstone, 2008). Given that attention operates largely in service of an individual’s goals and intentions, and that looking behaviour is positively correlated with reward (Sullivan, Johnson, Rothkopf, Ballard, & Hayhoe, 2012), a straight-forward prediction is that a selection bias for social stimuli over non-social stimuli reflects a subjective preference. However, an alternative possibility is that eye movements towards the social content of scenes (particularly the eyes of the people in the scenes) is being driven by a low-level neural system that is preferentially biased to process biologically relevant information (Laidlaw, Risko, & Kingstone, 2012). In this case, one’s subjective preference of the stimuli is not necessarily driving gaze behaviour. The aim of Experiment 1 was to determine whether subjective preference may be driving attention towards social stimuli. Participants were asked to subjectively rate their liking for non-social scenes and social scenes. Importantly, previous research has shown that the social scenes used in the present study attract fixations to the eyes of the people in the scenes (Birmingham et al., 2008). We also asked participants to introspect on how much they thought they had explored the social and non-social scenes. We did this to investigate the accuracy of subjective intuition as to how one looks at scenes. Because our past work has shown that there is a marked tendency for participants to fixate onto the eyes of people in the scenes, we predicted that participants would report they had explored social scenes less than non-social scenes. Experiment 1 Methods Participants Sixteen students from the University of British Columbia participated in the 30-minute experiment in exchange for course credit. Stimuli Participants viewed a slideshow of 51 unique images at their own pace. Of interest were 6 interior and 6