Department of Developmental and Social Psychology, University of Padova, 35131, Padua, Italy.
Department of Psychology and Center for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, School of Education, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, 510006, China.
Sci Rep. 2021 Oct 14;11(1):20410. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-99954-x.
The averted gaze of others triggers reflexive attentional orienting in the corresponding direction. This phenomenon can be modulated by many social factors. Here, we used an eye-tracking technique to investigate the role of ethnic membership in a cross-cultural oculomotor interference study. Chinese and Italian participants were required to perform a saccade whose direction might be either congruent or incongruent with the averted-gaze of task-irrelevant faces belonging to Asian and White individuals. The results showed that, for Chinese participants, White faces elicited a larger oculomotor interference than Asian faces. By contrast, Italian participants exhibited a similar oculomotor interference effect for both Asian and White faces. Hence, Chinese participants found it more difficult to suppress eye-gaze processing of White rather than Asian faces. The findings provide converging evidence that social attention can be modulated by social factors characterizing both the face stimulus and the participants. The data are discussed with reference to possible cross-cultural differences in perceived social status.
他人回避的目光会引发相应方向的反射性注意力转向。这种现象可以通过许多社会因素来调节。在这里，我们使用眼动追踪技术来研究种族归属在跨文化眼球运动干扰研究中的作用。中国和意大利的参与者被要求进行扫视，其方向可能与属于亚洲人和白人的无关任务面孔的回避目光一致或不一致。结果表明，对于中国参与者来说，白人面孔比亚洲面孔引起更大的眼球运动干扰。相比之下，意大利参与者对亚洲和白人面孔表现出相似的眼球运动干扰效应。因此，中国参与者发现，与亚洲面孔相比，他们更难抑制对白人面孔的目光处理。这些发现提供了一致的证据，表明社会注意力可以通过既描述面孔刺激又描述参与者的社会因素来调节。这些数据是根据感知到的社会地位的跨文化差异来讨论的。
