Scott Hannah, Batten Jonathan P, Kuhn Gustav
Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2019 Jan;81(1):109-118. doi: 10.3758/s13414-018-1588-6.
Our attention is particularly driven toward faces, especially the eyes, and there is much debate over the factors that modulate this social attentional orienting. Most of the previous research has presented faces in isolation, and we tried to address this shortcoming by measuring people's eye movements whilst they observe more naturalistic and varied social interactions. Participants' eye movements were monitored whilst they watched three different types of social interactions (monologue, manual activity, active attentional misdirection), which were either accompanied by the corresponding audio as speech or by silence. Our results showed that (1) participants spent more time looking at the face when the person was giving a monologue, than when he/she was carrying out manual activities, and in the latter case they spent more time fixating on the person's hands. (2) Hearing speech significantly increases the amount of time participants spent looking at the face (this effect was relatively small), although this was not accounted for by any increase in mouth-oriented gaze. (3) Participants spent significantly more time fixating on the face when direct eye contact was established, and this drive to establish eye contact was significantly stronger in the manual activities than during the monologue. These results highlight people's strategic top-down control over when they attend to faces and the eyes, and support the view that we use our eyes to signal non-verbal information.
我们的注意力尤其会被面部吸引，特别是眼睛，并且对于调节这种社会注意力定向的因素存在诸多争论。先前的大多数研究都是孤立地呈现面部，而我们试图通过测量人们在观察更自然多样的社会互动时的眼动来解决这一缺陷。在参与者观看三种不同类型的社会互动（独白、手部活动、主动注意力误导）时监测他们的眼动，这些互动要么伴有相应的语音音频，要么没有声音。我们的结果表明：（1）与进行手部活动相比，参与者在对方进行独白时看脸的时间更多，而在后者情况下他们花更多时间注视对方的手。（2）听到语音显著增加了参与者看脸的时间（这种效应相对较小），尽管这并非由看向嘴巴的注视增加所导致。（3）当建立直接眼神接触时，参与者注视面部的时间显著增加，并且在手部活动中建立眼神接触的驱动力比在独白期间显著更强。这些结果突出了人们对何时关注面部和眼睛的策略性自上而下的控制，并支持了我们利用眼睛来传达非语言信息的观点。
