Revisiting the relationship between the processing of gaze direction and the processing of facial expression.

There is mixed evidence on the nature of the relationship between the perception of gaze direction and the perception of facial expressions. Major support for shared processing of gaze and expression comes from behavioral studies that showed that observers cannot process expression or gaze and ignore irrelevant variations in the other dimension. However, these studies have not considered the role of head orientation, which is known to play a key role in the processing of gaze direction. In a series of experiments, the relationship between the processing of expression and gaze was tested both with head orientation held constant and with head orientation varied between trials, making it a relevant source of information for computing gaze direction. Results show that when head orientation varied between trials, the processing of facial expression was not interfered with gaze direction, and conversely, the processing of gaze could be made without being interfered from irrelevant variations in expression. These findings suggest that the processing of gaze and the processing of expression are not functionally interconnected as was previously assumed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gaze direction modulates the disengagement of attention from facial expression in 10-month-olds.

This study investigated whether the disengagement of attention from facial expression is modulated by gaze direction in infants. To this end, we measured the saccadic reaction time required for the 10-month-olds to disengage their attention from angry and happy expressions combined with either straight or averted gaze. The 10-month-olds' disengagement of their attention from happy faces was modulated by gaze direction. This finding indicates that gaze direction strongly influences infants' allocation of attention to facial expressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention to gaze and emotion in schizophrenia.

Objective: Individuals with schizophrenia have difficulty interpreting social and emotional cues such as facial expression, gaze direction, body position, and voice intonation. Nonverbal cues are powerful social signals but are often processed implicitly, outside the focus of attention. The aim of this research was to assess implicit processing of social cues in individuals with schizophrenia. Method: Patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and matched controls performed a primary task of word classification with social cues in the background. Participants were asked to classify target words (LEFT/RIGHT) by pressing a key that corresponded to the word, in the context of facial expressions with eye gaze averted to the left or right. Results: Although facial expression and gaze direction were irrelevant to the task, these facial cues influenced word classification performance. Participants were slower to classify target words (e.g., LEFT) that were incongruent to gaze direction (e.g., eyes averted to the right) compared to target words (e.g., LEFT) that were congruent to gaze direction (e.g., eyes averted to the left), but this only occurred for expressions of fear. This pattern did not differ for patients and controls. Conclusion: The results showed that threat-related signals capture the attention of individuals with schizophrenia. These data suggest that implicit processing of eye gaze and fearful expressions is intact in schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anxiety and sensitivity to gaze direction in emotionally expressive faces.

This study investigated the role of neutral, happy, fearful, and angry facial expressions in enhancing orienting to the direction of eye gaze. Photographs of faces with either direct or averted gaze were presented. A target letter (T or L) appeared unpredictably to the left or the right of the face, either 300 ms or 700 ms after gaze direction changed. Response times were faster in congruent conditions (i.e., when the eyes gazed toward the target) relative to incongruent conditions (when the eyes gazed away from the target letter). Facial expression did influence reaction times, but these effects were qualified by individual differences in self-reported anxiety. High trait-anxious participants showed an enhanced orienting to the eye gaze of faces with fearful expressions relative to all other expressions. In contrast, when the eyes stared straight ahead, trait anxiety was associated with slower responding when the facial expressions depicted anger. Thus, in anxiety-prone people attention is more likely to be held by an expression of anger, whereas attention is guided more potently by fearful facial expressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional expression modulates perceived gaze direction.

Gaze perception is an important social skill, as it portrays information about what another person is attending to. Gaze direction has been shown to affect interpretation of emotional expression. Here the authors investigate whether the emotional facial expression has a reciprocal influence on interpretation of gaze direction. In a forced-choice yes-no task, participants were asked to judge whether three faces expressing different emotions (anger, fear, happiness, and neutral) in different viewing angles were looking at them or not. Happy faces were more likely to be judged as looking at the observer than were angry, fearful, or neutral faces. Angry faces were more often judged as looking at the observer than were fearful and neutral expressions. These findings are discussed on the background of approach and avoidance orientation of emotions and of the self-referential positivity bias. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A direct link between gaze perception and social attention.

How information is exchanged between the cognitive mechanisms responsible for gaze perception and social attention is unclear. These systems could be independent; the “gaze cueing” effect could emerge from the activation of a general-purpose attentional mechanism that is ignorant of the social nature of the gaze cue. Alternatively, orienting to social gaze direction might be directly determined by the operation of cognitive mechanisms specifically dedicated to gaze perception. This second notion is the dominant assumption in the literature, but there is little direct support for this account. Here, we systematically manipulated observers' perception of gaze direction by implementing a gaze adaptation paradigm. Gaze cueing was reduced only in conditions where perception of specific averted gaze stimuli was impaired (Experiment 1). Adaptation to a pointing stimulus failed to impact gaze cueing (Experiment 2). Overall, these data suggest a direct link between the specific operation of gaze perception mechanisms and the consequential orienting of attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Does Facial Expression Affect Attention Orienting by Gaze Direction Cues?

In 6 experiments, the authors investigated whether attention orienting by gaze direction is modulated by the emotional expression (neutral, happy, angry, or fearful) on the face. The results showed a clear spatial cuing effect by gaze direction but no effect by facial expression. In addition, it was shown that the cuing effect was stronger with schematic faces than with real faces, that gaze cuing could be achieved at very short stimulus onset asynchronies (14 ms), and that there was no evidence for a difference in the strength of cuing triggered by static gaze cues and by cues involving apparent motion of the pupils. In sum, the results suggest that in normal, healthy adults, eye direction processing for attention shifts is independent of facial expression analysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-relevance processing in the human amygdala: Gaze direction, facial expression, and emotion intensity.

How the processing of emotional expression is influenced by perceived gaze remains a debated issue. Discrepancies between previous results may stem from differences in the nature of stimuli and task characteristics. Here we used a highly controlled set of computer-generated animated faces combining dynamic emotional expressions with varying intensity, and gaze shifts either directed at or averted from the observer. We predicted that perceived self-relevance of fearful faces would be higher with averted gaze—signaling a nearby danger; whereas conversely, direct gaze would be more relevant for angry faces—signaling aggressiveness. This interaction pattern was observed behaviorally for emotion intensity ratings, and neurally for functional magnetic resonance imaging activation in amygdala, as well as fusiform and medial prefrontal cortices, but only for mild- and not high-intensity expressions. These results support an involvement of human amygdala in the appraisal of self-relevance and reveal a crucial role of expression intensity in emotion and gaze interactions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of spatial cueing on representational momentum.

Effects of a spatial cue on representational momentum were examined. If a cue was present during or after target motion and indicated the location at which the target would vanish or had vanished, forward displacement of that target decreased. The decrease in forward displacement was larger when cues were present after target motion than when cues were present during target motion. If a cue was present during target motion, high-relevant cues (that indicated the final location of the target) led to larger decreases in forward displacement than did low-relevant cues (that indicated only the horizontal coordinate of the final location of the target). If a cue was present after target motion, there was a trend for low-relevant cues to lead to larger decreases in forward displacement than did high-relevant cues. Possible explanations involving displacement of the cue or landmark attraction are considered. Implications for the relationship of attention and representational momentum, and for whether representational momentum reflects an automatic process, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Is chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) spatial attention reflexively triggered by gaze cue?

Humans show a reflexive shift in spatial attention triggered by gaze cues. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have an excellent ability to follow another's gaze, but they exhibit a limited capacity to engage in triadic interactions based on joint attention, suggesting the possibility of contributions of the different mechanisms underlying joint attention between humans and chimpanzees. The present study thus examined how the chimpanzee's visual spatial attention is triggered by gaze cues. Two chimpanzees showed no clear signs of attention shift triggered by various kinds of nonfacial and facial stimuli with averted gaze under the letter-discrimination tasks but showed significant cueing effects when the head-turning cue was presented in a quasi-dynamic manner. These cueing effects were, however, affected by the predictability of the gaze cue: Highly predictive gaze cues caused stronger cueing effects than less predictive cues. Thus, these results suggest that the shift in spatial attention caused by gaze cues does occur in chimpanzees, but, in contrast to humans, vulnerability against the cue predictability suggests that the voluntary mechanism contributes more dominantly than the reflexive mechanism to this attention shift. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Garner interference reveals dependencies between emotional expression and gaze in face perception.

The relationship between facial expression and gaze processing was investigated with the Garner selective attention paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants performed expression judgments without interference from gaze, but expression interfered with gaze judgments. Experiment 2 replicated these results across different emotions. In both experiments, expression judgments occurred faster than gaze judgments, suggesting that expression was processed before gaze could interfere. In Experiments 3 and 4, the difficulty of the emotion discrimination was increased in two different ways. In both cases, gaze interfered with emotion judgments and vice versa. Furthermore, increasing the difficulty of the emotion discrimination resulted in gaze and expression interactions. Results indicate that expression and gaze interactions are modulated by discriminability. Whereas expression generally interferes with gaze judgments, gaze direction modulates expression processing only when facial emotion is difficult to discriminate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gaze cueing of attention: Visual attention, social cognition, and individual differences.

During social interactions, people's eyes convey a wealth of information about their direction of attention and their emotional and mental states. This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of past and current research into the perception of gaze behavior and its effect on the observer. This encompasses the perception of gaze direction and its influence on perception of the other person, as well as gaze-following behavior such as joint attention, in infant, adult, and clinical populations. Particular focus is given to the gaze-cueing paradigm that has been used to investigate the mechanisms of joint attention. The contribution of this paradigm has been significant and will likely continue to advance knowledge across diverse fields within psychology and neuroscience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Orienting and maintenance of gaze to facial expressions in social anxiety.

In 2 experiments, the authors tested predictions from cognitive models of social anxiety regarding attentional biases for social and nonsocial cues by monitoring eye movements to pictures of faces and objects in high social anxiety (HSA) and low social anxiety (LSA) individuals. Under no-stress conditions (Experiment 1), HSA individuals initially directed their gaze toward neutral faces, relative to objects, more often than did LSA participants. However, under social-evaluative stress (Experiment 2), HSA individuals showed reduced biases in initial orienting and maintenance of gaze on faces (cf. objects) compared with the LSA group. HSA individuals were also relatively quicker to look at emotional faces than neutral faces but looked at emotional faces for less time, compared with LSA individuals, consistent with a vigilant-avoidant pattern of bias. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modulation of object-based attention by spatial focus under endogenous and exogenous orienting.

In R. Egly, J. Driver, and R. D. Rafal's (1994) influential double-rectangle spatial-cuing paradigm, exogenous cues consistently induce object-based attention, whereas endogenous cues generally induce space-based attention. This difference suggests an interdependency between mode of orienting (endogenous vs exogenous) and mode of selection (object based vs space based). However, mode of orienting is generally confounded with initial focus of attention: Endogenous orienting begins with attention focused on a central cue, whereas exogenous orienting begins with attention widely spread. In this study, an attentional-focusing hypothesis is examined and supported by experiments showing that for both endogenous and exogenous cuing, object-based effects are obtained under conditions that encourage spread attention, but they are attenuated under conditions that encourage focused attention. General implications for object-based attention are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's use of the temporal dimension of gaze for inferring preference.

This study examined 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to spontaneously use the relative duration and frequency of another's object-directed gaze for inferring that person's preference. In Experiment 1, analysis revealed a strong age effect for judgment accuracy, which could not be accounted for by cue-monitoring proficiency. Reducing the saliency of the objects in Experiment 2 yielded significant improvement in the younger children's performance. Thus, at 4 years, children already show signs of attending to the temporal dimension of gaze for making mentalistic inferences of preferential liking, but their competence may be undermined by the object choices themselves. By 5 years, they appear to overcome this competition. The obtained developmental difference is discussed in terms of concurrent transitions in attention regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anxiety meets fear in perception of dynamic expressive gaze.

This study investigated in 2 experiments whether reflexive cuing of attention that occurs after perception of a gaze cue is greater for fearful than for happy faces in normal participants, as hypothesized from a social neuroscience perspective. To increase neuroecological validity, dynamic stimulus presentation was used to display faces that simultaneously morphed from a neutral expression into a happy or fearful one and shifted eye gaze from the center to the periphery. Shifts of attention resulting from a natural fearful gaze were expected to be related to participants' anxiety traits, in agreement with the often found increased selective attention to threat in anxious participants. Both hypotheses were confirmed: Fearful faces induced stronger gaze cuing than happy faces, and the strength of this cuing effect was correlated to participants' anxiety levels. These results suggest a neural network, which integrates the processing of gaze, expression, and emotional states to adaptively prime vigilance under threatening circumstances. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Separate mechanisms recruited by exogenous and endogenous spatial cues: Evidence from a spatial Stroop paradigm.

The present experiments tested whether endogenous and exogenous cues produce separate effects on target processing. In Experiment 1, participants discriminated whether an arrow presented left or right of fixation pointed to the left or right. For 1 group, the arrow was preceded by a peripheral noninformative cue. For the other group, the arrow was preceded by a central, symbolic, informative cue. The 2 types of cues modulated the spatial Stroop effect in opposite ways, with endogenous cues producing larger spatial Stroop effects for valid trials and exogenous cues producing smaller spatial Stroop effects for valid trials. In Experiments 2A and 2B, the influence of peripheral noninformative and peripheral informative cues on the spatial Stroop effect was directly compared. The spatial Stroop effect was smaller for valid than for invalid trials for both types of cues. These results point to a distinction between the influence of central and peripheral attentional cues on performance and are not consistent with a unitary view of endogenous and exogenous attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When cross-modal spatial attention fails.

There is now convincing evidence that an involuntary shift of spatial attention to a stimulus in one modality can affect the processing of stimuli in other modalities, but inconsistent findings across different paradigms have led to controversy. Such inconsistencies have important implications for theories of cross-modal attention. The authors investigated why orienting attention to a visual event sometimes influences responses to subsequent sounds and why it sometimes fails to do so. They examined visual-cue-on-auditory-target effects in two paradigms--implicit spatial discrimination (ISD) and orthogonal cuing (OC)--that have yielded conflicting findings in the past. Consistent with previous research, visual cues facilitated responses to same-side auditory targets in the ISD paradigm but not in the OC paradigm. Furthermore, in the ISD paradigm, visual cues facilitated responses to auditory targets only when the targets were presented directly at the cued location, not when they appeared above or below the cued location. This pattern of results confirms recent claims that visual cues fail to influence responses to auditory targets in the OC paradigm because the targets fall outside the focus of attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Detection of directed gaze in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).

To examine the ability of monkeys to detect the direction of attention of other individuals, the authors quantitatively investigated the visual scanning pattern of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) in response to visually presented images of a human frontal face. The present results demonstrated not only that monkeys predominantly gaze at the eyes as compared with other facial areas in terms of duration and number of fixations, but also that they gaze at the eyes for a longer time period and more frequently when a human face, presented as a stimulus, gazed at them than when the gaze was shifted. These results indicate that rhesus monkeys are sensitive to the directed gaze of humans, suggesting that monkeys pay more attention to the human whose attention is directed to them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective attention to facial emotion in physically abused children.

The ability to allocate attention to emotional cues in the enviromnent is an important feature of adaptive self-regulation. Existing data suggest that physically abused children overattend to angry expressions, but the attentional mechanisms underlying such behavior are unknown. The authors tested 8-11-year-old physically abused children to determine whether they displayed specific information-processing problems in a selective attention paradigm using emotional faces as cues. Physically abused children demonstrated delayed disengagement when angry faces served as invalid cues. Abused children also demonstrated increased attentional benefits on valid angry trials. Results are discussed in terms of the influence of early adverse experience on children's selective attention to threat-related signals as a mechanism in the development of psychopathology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)