Face age and social status exert different modulatory effects on gaze following behaviour

Face age and social status exert different modulatory effects on gaze following behaviour Francesca Ciardo (francesca.ciardo@unimore.it) Department of Communication and Economics, Viale Allegri, 9 42121 Reggio Emilia, Italy Barbara F.M. Marino (barbara.marino@unimib.it) Department of Psychology, Edificio U6 Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo, 1 20126, Milano, Italy Angela Rossetti (a.rossetti5@campus.unimib.it) Department of Psychology, Edificio U6 Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo, 1 20126, Milano, Italy Rossana Actis-Grosso (rossana.actis@unimib.it) Department of Psychology, Edificio U6 Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo, 1 20126, Milano, Italy Paola Ricciardelli (paola.ricciardelli@unimib.it) Department of Psychology, Edificio U6 Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo, 1 20126, Milano, Italy Abstract The aim of the present study was to investigate whether face age and social status information associated with faces have different effects on gaze following behaviour as an index of joint attention. Participants were instructed to perform goal- directed saccades towards a peripheral stationary target, while a task-irrelevant face with averted gaze was presented. Faces of three different age groups (younger adults; middle-aged adults; and older adults) were associated with fictional resumes which could describe distracters as high or low social status people. Results showed that face age affected both saccade accuracy and latencies. Social status did not have an effect on accuracy and only affected correct saccades with higher latencies by modulating the face age effect. It is argued that the overt orienting of joint attention could be affected both by perceptual and higher order socio-cognitive factors, but at different stages of processing. Keywords: Joint attention, Social Status, Face Age, Gaze Following, Social cognition, Automaticity. Introduction Understanding what a co-specific sees is necessary for social cognition. The gaze of others allows the rapid extraction of socially relevant information such as their mental and attentional states (i.e. the focus of their attention; e.g. Baron-Cohen 1995), and allows us to understand and predict their future actions (e.g. Pierno et al. 2006; Innocenti et al., 2012). Several studies have shown that perceiving averted gaze leads the observer to automatically shift his/her attention in the same direction or towards the same object that the other person is looking at (Friesen and Kingstone, 1998; Driver et al., 1999; Frischen, Bayliss and Tipper, 2007). For example, an uninformative cue by a centrally- presented face gazing to one-location reliably reduces reaction time to targets presented peripherally at the location consistent with the gaze (i.e. gaze cueing effect, e.g. Driver et al., 1999). The automatic shift of attention in the direction of another person’s gaze - known as joint or social attention, can be achieved both overtly, through eye movements (gaze- following behaviour), and/or covertly without eye movements. Gaze following behaviour (i.e. overt orienting of joint attention), which is considered an early and a direct index of joint attention orienting, is present early in development (Morales et al., 1998; Mundy and Newell, 2007) in humans and studies have shown that many species, including non-human primates, orient gaze in the direction of a co-specific’s gaze and use it for interaction (for a review see Shepherd, 2010). In adults the automatic nature of gaze following behaviour has been shown by Ricciardelli and colleagues (2002) who by using an oculomotor task reported a significant increase in the number of erroneous saccades matching the direction of the distracting gaze (gaze following errors, GFE). This was taken as evidence that perceiving a gaze shift can interfere with the execution of an oculomotor task by affecting oculomotor programming. However, recent studies have shown that attention orienting driven by gaze is likely to be a product of both stimulus-driven and top-down attentional mechanisms (e.g. Greene et al., 2009). Therefore, modulatory effects on joint attention should be possible. It is more likely, in fact, that some gaze shifts are more important than others depending on face features, environment relevance or current task.