Lo Gerfo Emanuele, De Angelis Jacopo, Vergallito Alessandra, Bossi Francesco, Romero Lauro Leonor Josefina, Ricciardelli Paola
Department of Economics, Management and Statistics, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy.
CISEPS, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2018 Nov 14;9:2213. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02213. eCollection 2018.
Selective visual attention is a primary cognitive function, which allows the selection of the most relevant stimuli in the environment by prioritizing their processing. Several studies showed that this process can be influenced by both social signals, such as gaze direction (i.e., the Gaze Cueing Effect, GCE) and by the motivational valence of gratifying stimuli, such as monetary rewards. The aim of this study was to explore whether GCE could be modulated by a monetary reward. To this end, we created an experiment in which participants performed a gaze cuing task before and after an implicit learning task aiming to induce an association between gaze direction and monetary reward (experimental condition), or after a perceptual task (control condition). Statistical analyses were conducted following both a frequentist and a Bayesian approach. Results supported previous findings showing the presence of the GCE, i.e., faster responses in congruent trials when the target appeared in the gazed-at location. Interestingly, our results did not reveal significant differences among the conditions. Therefore, contrary to what was reported by previous attentional orienting studies with non-social stimuli, monetary reward does not seem to be able to modulate (or interfere with) the orienting of attention mediated by gaze direction as measured by the GCE. Taken together our results suggest that social signals such as gaze direction have a greater impact than monetary reward in orienting selective attention.
选择性视觉注意是一种主要的认知功能，它通过优先处理环境中最相关的刺激来进行选择。多项研究表明，这一过程会受到社会信号（如注视方向，即注视线索效应，GCE）以及诸如金钱奖励等令人愉悦刺激的动机效价的影响。本研究的目的是探究GCE是否会受到金钱奖励的调节。为此，我们设计了一项实验，在该实验中，参与者在一项旨在诱导注视方向与金钱奖励之间建立关联的内隐学习任务之前和之后（实验条件），或者在一项知觉任务之后（对照条件），执行一项注视线索任务。我们采用频率主义和贝叶斯方法进行了统计分析。结果支持了之前关于GCE存在的研究结果，即在目标出现在注视位置的一致性试验中反应更快。有趣的是，我们的结果并未揭示不同条件之间存在显著差异。因此，与之前关于非社会刺激的注意定向研究的报道相反，金钱奖励似乎无法调节（或干扰）由GCE测量的由注视方向介导的注意定向。综合我们的结果表明，在定向选择性注意方面，诸如注视方向等社会信号比金钱奖励具有更大的影响。
