Context Modulates Congruency Effects in Selective Attention to Social Cues
Head and gaze directions are used during social interactions as essential cues to infer where someone attends. When head and gaze are oriented toward opposite directions, we need to extract socially meaningful information despite stimulus conflict. Recently, a cognitive and neural mechanism for filt...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2018-06-01
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| Series: | Frontiers in Psychology |
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| Online Access: | https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00940/full |
| _version_ | 1811267288966365184 |
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| author | Andrea Ravagli Francesco Marini Francesco Marini Francesco Marini Barbara F. M. Marino Paola Ricciardelli Paola Ricciardelli |
| author_facet | Andrea Ravagli Francesco Marini Francesco Marini Francesco Marini Barbara F. M. Marino Paola Ricciardelli Paola Ricciardelli |
| author_sort | Andrea Ravagli |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Head and gaze directions are used during social interactions as essential cues to infer where someone attends. When head and gaze are oriented toward opposite directions, we need to extract socially meaningful information despite stimulus conflict. Recently, a cognitive and neural mechanism for filtering-out conflicting stimuli has been identified while performing non-social attention tasks. This mechanism is engaged proactively when conflict is anticipated in a high proportion of trials and reactively when conflict occurs infrequently. Here, we investigated whether a similar mechanism is at play for limiting distraction from conflicting social cues during gaze or head direction discrimination tasks in contexts with different probabilities of conflict. Results showed that, for the gaze direction task only (Experiment 1), inverse efficiency (IE) scores for distractor-absent trials (i.e., faces with averted gaze and centrally oriented head) were larger (indicating worse performance) when these trials were intermixed with congruent/incongruent distractor-present trials (i.e., faces with averted gaze and tilted head in the same/opposite direction) relative to when the same distractor-absent trials were shown in isolation. Moreover, on distractor-present trials, IE scores for congruent (vs. incongruent) head-gaze pairs in blocks with rare conflict were larger than in blocks with frequent conflict, suggesting that adaptation to conflict was more efficient than adaptation to infrequent events. However, when the task required discrimination of head orientation while ignoring gaze direction, performance was not impacted by both block-level and current trial congruency (Experiment 2), unless the cognitive load of the task was increased by adding a concurrent task (Experiment 3). Overall, our study demonstrates that during attention to social cues proactive cognitive control mechanisms are modulated by the expectation of conflicting stimulus information at both the block- and trial-sequence level, and by the type of task and cognitive load. This helps to clarify the inherent differences in the distracting potential of head and gaze cues during speeded social attention tasks. |
| first_indexed | 2024-04-12T20:59:49Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-ffcb5cbe2695465cbed05d2cfe512173 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 1664-1078 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-04-12T20:59:49Z |
| publishDate | 2018-06-01 |
| publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Frontiers in Psychology |
| spelling | doaj.art-ffcb5cbe2695465cbed05d2cfe5121732022-12-22T03:16:53ZengFrontiers Media S.A.Frontiers in Psychology1664-10782018-06-01910.3389/fpsyg.2018.00940369850Context Modulates Congruency Effects in Selective Attention to Social CuesAndrea Ravagli0Francesco Marini1Francesco Marini2Francesco Marini3Barbara F. M. Marino4Paola Ricciardelli5Paola Ricciardelli6Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, ItalyDepartment of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, ItalyDepartment of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, NV, United StatesSwartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, Institute for Neural Computation, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA, United StatesDepartment of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, ItalyDepartment of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, ItalyMilan Center for Neuroscience, Milan, ItalyHead and gaze directions are used during social interactions as essential cues to infer where someone attends. When head and gaze are oriented toward opposite directions, we need to extract socially meaningful information despite stimulus conflict. Recently, a cognitive and neural mechanism for filtering-out conflicting stimuli has been identified while performing non-social attention tasks. This mechanism is engaged proactively when conflict is anticipated in a high proportion of trials and reactively when conflict occurs infrequently. Here, we investigated whether a similar mechanism is at play for limiting distraction from conflicting social cues during gaze or head direction discrimination tasks in contexts with different probabilities of conflict. Results showed that, for the gaze direction task only (Experiment 1), inverse efficiency (IE) scores for distractor-absent trials (i.e., faces with averted gaze and centrally oriented head) were larger (indicating worse performance) when these trials were intermixed with congruent/incongruent distractor-present trials (i.e., faces with averted gaze and tilted head in the same/opposite direction) relative to when the same distractor-absent trials were shown in isolation. Moreover, on distractor-present trials, IE scores for congruent (vs. incongruent) head-gaze pairs in blocks with rare conflict were larger than in blocks with frequent conflict, suggesting that adaptation to conflict was more efficient than adaptation to infrequent events. However, when the task required discrimination of head orientation while ignoring gaze direction, performance was not impacted by both block-level and current trial congruency (Experiment 2), unless the cognitive load of the task was increased by adding a concurrent task (Experiment 3). Overall, our study demonstrates that during attention to social cues proactive cognitive control mechanisms are modulated by the expectation of conflicting stimulus information at both the block- and trial-sequence level, and by the type of task and cognitive load. This helps to clarify the inherent differences in the distracting potential of head and gaze cues during speeded social attention tasks.https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00940/fullgaze discriminationhead orientationsocial cuessocial attentiondistraction context manipulation paradigmproactive control |
| spellingShingle | Andrea Ravagli Francesco Marini Francesco Marini Francesco Marini Barbara F. M. Marino Paola Ricciardelli Paola Ricciardelli Context Modulates Congruency Effects in Selective Attention to Social Cues Frontiers in Psychology gaze discrimination head orientation social cues social attention distraction context manipulation paradigm proactive control |
| title | Context Modulates Congruency Effects in Selective Attention to Social Cues |
| title_full | Context Modulates Congruency Effects in Selective Attention to Social Cues |
| title_fullStr | Context Modulates Congruency Effects in Selective Attention to Social Cues |
| title_full_unstemmed | Context Modulates Congruency Effects in Selective Attention to Social Cues |
| title_short | Context Modulates Congruency Effects in Selective Attention to Social Cues |
| title_sort | context modulates congruency effects in selective attention to social cues |
| topic | gaze discrimination head orientation social cues social attention distraction context manipulation paradigm proactive control |
| url | https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00940/full |
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