Department of Psychology, Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2018 Aug 22;8(1):12555. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-30736-8.
Previous studies have shown an attentional bias towards social features during free-viewing of naturalistic scenes. This social attention seems to be reflexive and able to defy top-down demands in form of explicit search tasks. However, the question remains whether social features continue to be prioritized when peripheral information is limited, thereby reducing the influence of bottom-up image information on gaze orienting. Therefore, we established a gaze-contingent viewing paradigm, in which the visual field was constrained and updated in response to the viewer's eye movements. Participants viewed social and non-social images that were randomly allocated to a free and a gaze-contingent viewing condition while their eye movements were tracked. Our results revealed a strong attentional bias towards social features in both conditions. However, gaze-contingent viewing altered temporal and spatial dynamics of viewing behavior. Additionally, recurrent fixations were more frequent and closer together in time for social compared to non-social stimuli in both viewing conditions. Taken together, this study implies a predominant selection of social features when bottom-up influences are diminished and a general influence of social content on visual exploratory behavior, thus highlighting mechanisms of social attention.
先前的研究表明，在观看自然场景时，人们会对社交特征产生注意力偏向。这种社交注意力似乎是反射性的，能够违背以明确搜索任务形式呈现的自上而下的要求。然而，问题仍然是，当外围信息受到限制时，社交特征是否会继续被优先处理，从而减少了底层图像信息对注视方向的影响。因此，我们建立了一个注视相关的观看范式，其中视野根据观察者的眼球运动进行约束和更新。参与者观看随机分配到自由观看和注视相关观看条件下的社交和非社交图像，同时跟踪他们的眼球运动。我们的结果表明，在这两种条件下，人们对社交特征都存在强烈的注意力偏向。然而，注视相关观看改变了观看行为的时间和空间动态。此外，在两种观看条件下，与非社交刺激相比，社交刺激的重复注视更加频繁，并且时间上更加接近。总的来说，这项研究表明，当底层影响减弱时，社交特征会被优先选择，社交内容对视觉探索行为也会产生普遍影响，从而突出了社交注意力的机制。
