Joint attention (i.e. looking where others look) can implicitly elicit positive social behaviour: people trust more and are more altruistic toward individuals who are helpful in cueing relevant objects than toward unhelpful individuals. Does this effect extend to intergroup contexts? White and Black participants (Studies 1 and 3) and Male and Female participants (Study 2) completed a joint attention task in which outgroup faces would provide helpful cues to the response target, and ingroup faces would be unhelpful. Then, participants completed an economic ultimatum game in which they could make altruistic offers to the same faces and finally rated the faces' trustworthiness. Studies 1 and 2 showed a reliable intergroup joint attention effect and a relationship between trustworthiness perception and altruism. Study 3 showed the independent contribution of gaze-induced trust learning and intergroup trustworthiness perception, and that the link between social learning and altruism is the most evident when intergroup salience is limited. Overall, these data indicate that gaze-mediated social learning increases intergroup altruism by affecting perception of trustworthiness.

Although gaze following is an important socio-interactive process, little is known about how this behavior is affected when multiple gaze cues are encountered in groups. Emerging research suggests that both visual consistency of cues and group size may play a role. For example, in groups of three, a minority of target-congruent gaze cues (or 1/3 faces looking at the target) have been found to facilitate target responses, whereas in groups of five, a majority of target-congruent gaze cues (or 3/5 faces looking at the target) were needed for the same effect. Here, in two preregistered experiments, we provide a high-powered conceptual replication of these past experiments and extend them to examine the possible uniqueness of responses to gaze using a comparison with arrows. We found that a minority of target-congruent gaze and arrow cues significantly facilitated target responses regardless of group size. Furthermore, we found that additional target-congruent cues, either gaze or arrows, led to further significant response facilitation. Thus, initially, responses were facilitated by a minority proportion of target-congruent cues with response times continuing to decrease with increasing numerosity of cues' spatial consistency toward the target. This suggests that humans may use both quorum-like and numerosity evaluation flexibly to guide responses in contexts presenting with multiple social or non-social cues.

Human eyes are hypothesized to play a critical role in social cognition, but this hypothesis has yet to be tested concretely in naturalistic settings. This study investigated how direct gaze (i.e., looking someone in their eyes) during live interactions contributes to impression formation and subsequent social cognition processes. Participants were invited to interact with confederates acting as impression targets (e.g., four different people, one at a time), rated each target’s personality after the interaction, and then completed a gaze-cuing procedure as a measure of joint attention. Our research questions were (1) whether direct gaze occurrence varies as a function of eyes’ visibility, (2) whether such variations meaningfully relate to impression accuracy, and (3) whether they additionally modulate subsequent joint attention. Results show that participants mainly looked at the targets’ eyes during the interaction, particularly when their eyes were visible. Additionally, direct gaze showed limited abilities to predict impression accuracy but preliminary links with joint attention. Integrating theories and methods from both social cognitive psychology and personality psychology, this research shows the concrete importance of the social information conveyed by eyes in our everyday lives.

Humans have a long-standing evolutionary history of group belonging. Our visual system should thus be tuned to detect social groups, especially those in interactive or "core configurations," where group members face each other. Past work shows that two individuals are detected more efficiently when they are facing toward (vs. away from) each other. Here we tested whether this facing advantage extends to small social groups of three, or triads. In three preregistered experiments, participants searched for a facing group (among non-facing ones) or a non-facing group (among facing ones). Facing groups were found faster than non-facing ones, demonstrating a perceptual advantage for groups in core configurations (Experiment 1). This advantage persisted in inverted displays, suggesting a role for cues to body orientation (Experiments 2 and 3). Human perception is thus well-tuned to detect not just prototypical dyadic interactions, but interactive configurations more generally, facilitating efficient processing of complex social information.

IntroductionAlthough it is well established that humans spontaneously attend to where others are looking, it remains debated whether this gaze following behavior occurs because gaze communicates directional information (i.e., where an agent is looking) or because gaze communicates an agent’s inferred mental content (i.e., what an agent perceives), both of which rely on the processes involved in the general Theory of Mind ability.MethodsTo address this question, in two Experiments we used a novel task to measure how spatially dissociated and spatially combined effects of an agent’s gaze direction and perceived mental content influence target performance. We also contrasted performance for social directional cues and nonsocial arrows.ResultsOur data revealed that performance was compromised when cue direction and mental content dissociated relative to when they combined. Performance for dissociated components was especially prominent when a social avatar served as a cue relative to a comparison arrow.DiscussionTogether, these data show that a typical gaze signal communicates information about both where an agent is attending and what they are attending to.

Psychology has made tremendous strides in understanding the effects that social stimuli have on attention. However, one aspect that has received relatively less consideration is the role that attention plays in social interactions. The present review examines how attentional orienting, engagement, and communication affect and shape a diverse array of social processes, including person perception, discrimination, and group structures. Specifically, the empirical evidence reviewed here points to the notions that (1) attentional orienting mediates learning and acquisition of others' attitudes and reflects or reinforces the use of stereotypical social information; (2) attentional engagement increases the accuracy of impression formation and modulates impression valence (positive vs. negative) depending on contextual and cultural factors; (3) attentional communication conveys socially appropriate behavior depending on interpersonal factors such as familiarity, intimacy, and social status. Overall, this review reveals that the links between cognitive and social psychology are strong and bidirectional, binds that hold the potential for many new and exciting discoveries in the near future.

Human eyes convey a wealth of social information, with mutual looks representing one of the hallmark gaze communication behaviors. However, it remains relatively unknown if such reciprocal communication requires eye-to-eye contact or if general face-to-face looking is sufficient. To address this question, while recording looking behavior in live interacting dyads using dual mobile eye trackers, we analyzed how often participants engaged in mutual looks as a function of looking towards the top (i.e., the Eye region) and bottom half of the face (i.e., the Mouth region). We further examined how these different types of mutual looks during an interaction connected with later gaze-following behavior elicited in an individual experimental task. The results indicated that dyads engaged in mutual looks in various looking combinations (Eye-to-eye, Eye-to-mouth, and Mouth-to-Mouth) but proportionately spent little time in direct eye-to-eye gaze contact. However, the time spent in eye-to-eye contact significantly predicted the magnitude of later gaze following response elicited by the partner's gaze direction. Thus, humans engage in looking patterns toward different face parts during interactions, with direct eye-to-eye looks occurring relatively infrequently; however, social messages relayed during eye-to-eye contact appear to carry key information that propagates to affect subsequent individual social behavior.

With the widespread adoption of masks, there is a need for understanding how facial obstruction affects emotion recognition. We asked 120 participants to identify emotions from faces with and without masks. We also examined if recognition performance was related to autistic traits and personality. Masks impacted recognition of expressions with diagnostic lower face features the most and those with diagnostic upper face features the least. Persons with higher autistic traits were worse at identifying unmasked expressions, while persons with lower extraversion and higher agreeableness were better at recognizing masked expressions. These results show that different features play different roles in emotion recognition and suggest that obscuring features affects social communication differently as a function of autistic traits and personality.

Humans organise their social worlds into social and nonsocial events. Social event segmentation refers to the ability to parse the environmental content into social and nonsocial events or units. Here, we investigated the role that perceptual information from visual and auditory modalities, in isolation and in conjunction, played in social event segmentation. Participants viewed a video clip depicting an interaction between two actors and marked the boundaries of social and nonsocial events. Depending on the condition, the clip at first contained only auditory or only visual information. Then, the clip was shown containing both auditory and visual information. Higher overall group consensus and response consistency in parsing the clip was found for social segmentation and when both auditory and visual information was available. Presenting the clip in the visual domain only benefitted group agreement in social segmentation while the inclusion of auditory information (under the audiovisual condition) also improved response consistency in nonsocial segmentation. Thus, social segmentation utilises information from the visual modality, with the auditory cues contributing under ambiguous or uncertain conditions and during segmentation of nonsocial content.

Abstract. With the widespread adoption of masks, there is a need for understanding how facial obstruction affects emotion recognition. We asked 120 participants to identify emotions from faces with and without masks. We also examined if recognition performance was related to autistic traits and personality. Masks impacted recognition of expressions with diagnostic lower face features the most and those with diagnostic upper face features the least. Persons with higher autistic traits were worse at identifying unmasked expressions, while persons with lower extraversion and higher agreeableness were better at recognizing masked expressions. These results show that different features play different roles in emotion recognition and suggest that obscuring features affects social communication differently as a function of autistic traits and personality.

Group interactions influence human social and cognitive function. However, the non-verbal vehicles of that influence remain poorly understood. To address this question, here we present a taxonomy of interactive non-verbal attentional gaze behaviours - social referencing, participation, and mutual engagement - which we captured and characterized during live three-person interactions. Experiment 1 measured how each of these non-verbal indices predicted both the groups' social dynamic (in terms of leadership perception) and later individual group member's behaviour (in terms of gaze following magnitudes). The data indicated that the three attentional gaze behaviours (i) reliably reflected the groups' nonverbal dynamics, (ii) predicted the groups' social dynamics, and (iii) connected meaningfully with individual members' behaviour. Experiment 2 confirmed that these group-to-individual links were dependent on individuals participating in a prior group interaction. Thus, our taxonomy of nonverbal attentional gaze behaviours characterizes both group and individual function well, and as such provides a methodological foundation for future investigations of non-verbal group dynamics and their links with individual behaviour.

Two or more interacting individuals make up a social group. In this Review, we show that human attention plays a key part in the selection, management and maintenance of social interactions between individual members of social groups of any size. Three attentional mechanisms are presented here. The individual cue-selection mechanism facilitates the selection of social cues, such as gaze, facial or head information, from individual group members. The group-based selection mechanism enables selection based on the perceived quality of social cues derived from individual group members or the emerging interactions between individual group members. Finally, the crowd-based selection mechanism enables selection based on an overall representation of the social information derived from assessing the majority of consistent cues in the crowd. The three attentional mechanisms are used flexibly, interchangeably and dynamically as a function of group size and the ability to individuate group members. Human social groups depend on processes that enable social interactions. In this Review, Ristic and Capozzi present three attentional mechanisms that are flexibly and dynamically used to facilitate social interactions between individual group members as a function of the size of the social group.

Humans do not passively respond to agents and stimuli; we engage with our environments in reciprocal and interactive fashion. This special issue of Visual Cognition presents a collection of twelve original articles which demonstrate that interactive reciprocity changes the expression of basic cognitions and motor actions as well as resulting overt cognitive and social behaviours. The results from these studies highlight the need for a greater understanding of the mechanisms by which interactive reciprocity influences cognitions. They also showcase the feasibility of addressing research questions involving reciprocity using both the existing classic methods as well as novel approaches. The future of the emerging science of Interactive Cognition is bright!

For relational therapists who are acutely aware of male privilege, working with male clients may be challenging, including in (but not limited to) couple and family therapy. This challenge may be particularly true for beginning therapists. This paper outlines a guide to working in relational therapy with male clients from a gender-critical and socio-culturally attuned perspective. To this aim, the paper first summarizes a framework for gender-critical therapists to work with male clients. It then outlines recommendations based on the clients' level of endorsement or relationship to gender-normative masculinity (i.e., stereotypical, challenged, and disempowered relationship to masculinity). In the final sections, clinical vignettes show the application of some of these recommendations. This guide will benefit relational therapists who are questioning their ability to work with male clients in an inclusive fashion while remaining truthful to their gender-critical views.

What factors influence how accurately we express our personalities? Here, we investigated the role of targets' nonverbal expressivity or the intrapersonal coordination between head and body movements. To do so, using a novel movement quantification method, we examined whether variability in a person's behavioral coordination was related to how accurately their personality was perceived by naive observers. Targets who exhibited greater variability in intrapersonal behavior coordination, indicating more expressive behavior, were perceived more accurately on high observability personality items, such as how energetic and helpful they are. Moreover, these associations held controlling for other indicators of overall movement, self- and perceiver-rated extroversion, as well as how engaging and likable targets were perceived to be. This provides preliminary evidence that variability in intrapersonal behavioral coordination may be a unique behavioral indicator of expressive accuracy, although further research that replicates these findings and examines the causal associations is needed.

The research on mate choice has neglected preference for romantic partners of physically disabled individuals. In the present study we tested attractiveness evaluation of disabled individuals in a romantic context. Additionally, and according to the disease-avoidance mechanism proposed by behavioral immune system theory, individual differences in disgust sensitivity should result in prejudicial and negative responses against individuals with physical disabilities. This experimental study is the first to put this hypothesis to the test. Participants were presented with visual stimuli differing as a function of physical disability and were asked to rate them for attractiveness as a romantic partner. The results showed that women rate physically disabled men as more attractive as romantic partners than nondisabled men, while men rated physically disabled women less attractive as romantic partners than physically nondisabled women. Neither the perceived vulnerability to disease subscales nor pathogen and sexual disgust were associated with ratings of attractiveness of the disabled opposite sex as a romantic partner. These findings are inconsistent with the proposed association of disgust sensitivity and prejudicial attitudes towards physically disabled individuals; and they suggest, for the first time, that the perceptual effects of romantic attraction are different from those of general attraction for men but not women.

Physical appearance influences our perceptions, judgments, and decision making about others. While the current literature with regard to the perceptions and judgments of nondisabled people’s attractiveness is robust, the research investigating the perceived physical attractiveness and judgments of physically disabled individuals is scarce. Therefore, in the current study, we investigated whether people with physical disabilities are perceived by the opposite sex as more or less attractive relative to nondisabled individuals. Our results, based on over 675 participants, showed a positive effect for women’s attractiveness ratings of men with physical disabilities, but not men’s attractiveness ratings of physically disabled women. Moreover, social desirability bias was positively associated with attractiveness ratings of physically disabled individuals, meaning those with higher tendency to be viewed favorably by others rated physically disabled individuals more attractive. Finally, our results revealed that attractiveness ratings of individuals with physical disabilities are positively associated with extroversion and empathy in both men and women, and positively with agreeableness and negatively with neuroticism in women. In conclusion, our study showed women rate men with physical disabilities as higher on attractiveness than nondisabled men, which is also influenced by their social desirability bias.

Groups of people offer abundant opportunities for social interactions. We used a two-phase task to investigate how social cue numerosity and social information about an individual affected attentional allocation in such multi-agent settings. The learning phase was a standard gaze-cuing procedure in which a stimulus face could be either uninformative or informative about the upcoming target. The test phase was a group-cuing procedure in which the stimulus faces from the learning phase were presented in groups of three. The target could either be cued by the group minority (i.e., one face) or majority (i.e., two faces) or by uninformative or informative stimulus faces. Results showed an effect of cue numerosity, whereby responses were faster to targets cued by the group majority than the group minority. However, responses to targets cued by informative identities included in the group minority were as fast as responses to targets cued by the group majority. Thus, previously learned social information about an individual was able to offset the general enhancement of cue numerosity, revealing a complex interplay between cue numerosity and social information in guiding attention in multi-agent settings.

While masks are critical in mitigating disease contagion, they obscure facial features that are important for nonverbal social communication, i.e., emotions, intentions, or mental states. Here we investigated how nonverbal social communication is affected by mask wearing. We asked participants (n=117) to identify happy, angry, fearful, sad, surprised, disgusted, and neutral emotional expressions from masked and unmasked face images. Overall, the data indicated that both hit rate and sensitivity were reduced for all emotions when faces wore masks. Discrimination of disgust was impacted the most (52% reduction in sensitivity), indicating that recognition of this emotion relies strongly on information from the bottom of the face. Perception of sad (18% reduction), happy (15%), and surprised expressions (15%) were impacted less while angry (12%), neutral (8%) and fearful expressions (7%) were impacted the least, indicating that the recognition of these expressions may be largely driven by information from the top of the face (e.g., eyes). Together these results reveal novel insights about the face features contributing to different emotion recognition and additionally suggest an important impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on human social communication.

Research showing that visual perspective of others spontaneously interferes with our own has led to a stimulating debate about whether social attention effects are driven by the directionality of agent’s social cues, the perceived content of their minds, or both. Here, we use a novel task to dissociate the contributions of these two variables. Participants viewed an image of an avatar (N=51) or an arrow (N=57) at fixation. From their own perspective, participants located a peripheral target (number 8) that was presented with a distractor at an opposing location. The cue pointed at the target or at the distractor equally often. Further, the cue’s and the participants’ mental content either matched or mismatched depending on whether the cue indicated the target or the distractor. Replicating past work showing the typical effects of cue directionality, participants were overall faster to respond to targets when central cues pointed at the target. However, their responses were additionally facilitated when the perspective content matched relative to when it mismatched irrespective of cue type. As such, these results suggest that both cue directionality and mental content contribute to social attention and raise additional questions about the specific contributions of agency with social and non-social cues.