Institute of Brain and Psychological Sciences, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, 610068, People's Republic of China.
Sci Rep. 2023 Aug 12;13(1):13160. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-40195-5.
Recent studies have found that face masks affect social cognition and behaviour in the context of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The eyes, the only part of the face not covered by face masks, are an important spatial attention cue that can trigger social attention orienting. Here, we adopted a spatial gaze-cueing task to investigate whether face masks affect social attention orienting triggered by eye gaze cues. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to determine the orientation of a target line under two types of cues-masked and non-masked faces-and two stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) conditions (300 ms and 1000 ms). The results showed that masked faces induced a smaller gaze-cueing effect (GCE) compared to non-masked faces at 300 ms SOA, while two face types induced similar GCEs at 1000 ms SOA. Experiment 2 used mouth-obscured faces and non-masked faces as cues and found that no significant difference in GCE between the two types at either 300 ms or 1000 ms SOA, indicating that the reduction of GCE caused by the masked face was due to the social meaning expressed by the mask rather than a physical effect of masking. The present study extends previous findings to support the idea that high-level social information affects the processing of eye gaze direction and provides evidence that face masks affect social cognition and behaviour in the context of COVID-19.
最近的研究发现，口罩在新冠疫情的背景下影响社会认知和行为。眼睛是面部唯一没有被口罩覆盖的部分，是触发社交注意力指向的重要空间注意线索。在这里，我们采用空间注视线索任务来研究口罩是否会影响由眼部注视线索触发的社会注意力指向。在实验 1 中，参与者被要求在两种线索（戴口罩和不戴口罩的人脸）和两种刺激呈现时间间隔（SOA）条件（300ms 和 1000ms）下确定目标线的方向。结果表明，与不戴口罩的脸相比，戴口罩的脸在 300ms SOA 时引起的注视线索效应（GCE）较小，而两种脸类型在 1000ms SOA 时引起相似的 GCE。实验 2 使用嘴部遮挡的脸和不戴口罩的脸作为线索，发现两种类型的 GCE 在 300ms 或 1000ms SOA 时均无显著差异，表明口罩引起的 GCE 减少是由于口罩所表达的社会意义，而不是口罩的物理效应。本研究扩展了先前的发现，支持了高水平社会信息影响眼部注视方向处理的观点，并为口罩在 COVID-19 背景下影响社会认知和行为提供了证据。
