Numerical and non-numerical quantities are often mapped onto horizontal space. Previous research suggests that culture-related habits, such as reading and writing direction, can influence the orientation of this mapping. While cross-cultural differences have been observed in the spatial representation of time, similar effects have not been consistently found for numbers. This discrepancy has been attributed to the fact that reading and writing involve the sequential processing of information in a specific direction but are not inherently related to numerical content. These findings support the hypothesis that the spatial representation of magnitudes depends on specific experiential associations. The present study investigated potential cross-cultural differences in the spatial representation of visual speed by comparing participants from Italy, who use a left-to-right reading and writing system, with participants from Iran, who use a right-to-left system. Participants judged whether the speed of a centrally presented random dot kinematogram was slower or faster than a reference, using left or right response keys. Results revealed opposite spatial mappings of visual speed: a left-to-right mapping for Italian participants and a right-to-left mapping for Iranian participants. These findings support the view that reading and writing direction shapes the spatial representation of magnitudes intrinsically linked to directional reading experiences, such as motion at a specific speed.

Time is often conceptualised in spatial terms. For example, concepts such as ‘before’ and ‘after’ are frequently mapped onto the left and right sides of space, respectively. Importantly, such spatial mapping typically disappears when time is processed as a task-irrelevant dimension. In the present study, we further investigated this phenomenon using highly salient and socially relevant stimuli: human faces varying in age. We conducted two experiments using the same paradigm, in which the age of a female and a male face was processed either explicitly (Experiment 1; N = 120, 50

A key aspect of self-referential processing is that self-related stimuli tend to receive preferential processing in several cognitive domains. The so-called matching task has been introduced to quantify this bias by means of arbitrary self–other associations, aimed to minimize potential confounds related to stimulus familiarity. In this paradigm, participants learn associations between neutral shapes and social labels (e.g., self vs. stranger) and then perform a perceptual matching task. The self-prioritization effect (SPE) refers to the observation that participants are faster and more accurate in self-matching trials compared to matching trials concerning the “other”. Whether individual differences in implicit and explicit self-esteem can modulate the magnitude of the SPE is still a matter of debate. The present study aimed to address this question. Using a longitudinal design to assess the temporal stability of the effects, participants completed the Self-Esteem Implicit Association Test and the Name Letter Test as measures of implicit self-esteem, and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) as a measure of explicit self-esteem, alongside the matching task. The results confirmed the reliability of the SPE over time. Furthermore, unlike measures of implicit self-esteem, explicit self-esteem showed significant positive correlations with the SPE, with RSES scores being able to predict the magnitude of the SPE. Importantly, these associations were observed both within the same testing session and between sessions. These findings suggest that explicit self-evaluation is associated with the magnitude of self-prioritization. The possible implications of this pattern for theoretical accounts of self-referential processing are discussed. Prioritizing information about oneself is a pervasive feature of human cognition, shaping attention, memory, and social behavior. In a three-session study, we found that higher explicit self-esteem was positively correlated with the tendency to perceptually prioritize self-related information over stimuli related to the “other”. This suggests that the way we consciously perceive and evaluate ourselves can shape even rapid forms of self-related processing, with potential implications for understanding fluctuations in self-referential processing.

Recent evidence has highlighted differences in attentional shifting elicited by gaze and arrow stimuli. Specifically, in a spatial Stroop task, arrows consistently produce a standard congruency effect (SCE; faster reaction times on congruent vs. incongruent trials). In contrast, averted gaze stimuli produce a reversed congruency effect (RCE; faster reaction times on incongruent vs. congruent trials). The origin of this discrepancy is still under debate. One hypothesis suggests that the RCE for gaze is driven by joint attention (the shared focus of two individuals on the same object). According to this view, during incongruent trials, gaze stimuli appear to look toward the fixation stimulus, thus creating an episode of joint attention with the participant. To investigate this possibility, we conducted four experiments where participants identified the direction of a peripheral target (gaze or arrow). We also varied the fixation stimulus (symbolic cross or real-world object) and added an oculomotor component, to enhance joint attention contexts. Results consistently showed an SCE for arrows and an RCE for gaze, regardless of fixation type and the request to perform an eye movement, suggesting that joint attention, as operationalised in the present study, may not fully explain the RCE elicited by gaze.

In spatial Stroop tasks with gaze stimuli, the reversed congruency effect (RCE) refers to slower responses in congruent (i.e., a gaze pointing right presented on the right side of the screen) than incongruent (i.e., a gaze pointing right presented on the left side of the screen) trials. The nature of the RCE may stem from social attention mechanisms. In line with this social account, an increasing number of studies have shown that the RCE is modulated by characteristics of facial stimuli, such as social relevance or emotions. The present study investigated, through two cross-cultural online experiments, whether the RCE can be shaped by ethnicity. A total of 163 East Asian (Japanese) and European (Italian) participants completed a spatial Stroop task featuring East Asian and European faces. The two types of faces were presented either intermixed within the same block (Experiment 1) or in separate blocks (Experiment 2). The results revealed, in both experiments, a robust RCE, irrespective of participant or facial ethnicity. Overall, these findings offer new insights into the RCE and the boundary conditions for its potential modulation by social factors.

Social attention can be defined as the tendency to orient attentional resources in response to spatial cues provided by others, such as their gaze or head direction. This mechanism is essential for navigating real-world environments, where rapidly and accurately interpreting others' behaviour is often critical. Regarding head-driven orienting, research studies suggest that social attention can be enhanced when a front-facing head cue establishes eye contact (vs. no eye contact) with the observer, but also when the head cue is viewed from behind (vs. from the front), and hence, eye contact cannot be established. Across three experiments, we directly compared these two scenarios-which are highly common in everyday life-by presenting a central head cue showing either the front (establishing eye contact) or back, followed by a turn to the left or right. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were required to manually respond to peripheral targets while ignoring the head cue, whereas in Experiment 3, oculomotor responses were recorded. Although the initial view of the head did not affect manual responses, eye movement data revealed enhanced social attention when the head was initially viewed from the front. These results suggest that eye movements provide a sensitive measure for detecting potential social modulations of attention. Moreover, eye contact confirms here its role as a powerful social signal for humans, capable of boosting overt orienting responses. Future research should explore these effects in more dynamic and ecologically valid settings, such as real social interactions.

Mind wandering is a state in which our mental processes are directed towards task-unrelated thoughts. This phenomenon has been shown to underlie attentional lapses and represents a common experience in everyday life. Previous studies have found an association between mind wandering and eye-related indices. In the present study, we addressed for the first time whether the rate of microsaccades-miniaturised saccades that we spontaneously produce during prolonged fixation-is sensitive to the occurrence of mind wandering. Participants performed the Sustained Attention to Response Task, a go/no-go task highly vulnerable to mind wandering. The analyses focused on possible differences in microsaccade rate emerging from the comparison of time intervals preceding commission errors and time intervals preceding correct target withholds, under the assumption that a commission error would reflect a mind wandering episode. The results showed that microsaccadic rate was consistently reduced in time windows preceding a target trial in which participants produced a commission error as compared to when they correctly inhibited the tendency to manually respond. Cluster-based analyses established that this pattern was robust. Because microsaccades are known to occur involuntarily and a reduction in their frequency has been associated with higher mental effort, the present findings provide new insights as regards the relevance of mind wandering and lend support to the idea that during mind wandering our mind is far from being idle and is absorbed and committed to effortful activities instead.

Previous research has shown that the concept of self is malleable and can be associated with various arbitrary stimuli. This study explored whether the self could be linked to images of food representative of one's own or a different culture. We compared two groups, Italian and Japanese individuals, whose cultures are both characterized by rich and distinctive food traditions. Participants performed a perceptual matching task, associating themselves with either Italian or Japanese food, depending on the block. They also reported their food habits and preferences. The findings revealed that, in both groups, the self could extend to include food stimuli from both cultural categories. However, the self was more strongly associated with food typical of the participant's own culture. Additionally, this association was unrelated to reluctance to try unfamiliar foods, as measured by the Food Neophobia Scale. These results underscore the central role of food in shaping personal identity, supporting the hypothesis of a modulatory effect of valence on the strength of self-association with arbitrary items and suggesting that self-related food associations may influence food preferences.

This editorial introduces a broad Collection of works highlighting the central role of faces, the richest and most complex of social stimuli, in human behaviour. The Collection covers work from various areas of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience on different aspects of face perception: The development of face perception, the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms of face perception, the role of faces in social interaction, how neurological or psychiatric conditions can affect face perception, as well as face perception in human–machine interactions involving artificial agents with face-like features. This body of work underscores the profound impact of faces on social interaction, aiming to promote dialogue among different disciplines and inspire future research in this vibrant research domain.

Numerical and nonnumerical magnitudes can be represented along a hypothetical left-to-right continuum, where smaller quantities are associated with the left side and larger quantities with the right side. However, these representations are flexible, as their intensity and direction can be modulated by various contextual cues and task demands. In four experiments, we investigated the spatial representation of visual speed. Visual speed is inherently connected to physical space and spatial directions, making it distinct from other magnitudes. With this in mind, we explored whether the spatial representation of visual speed aligns with the typical left-to-right orientation or is influenced dynamically by the movement direction of the stimuli. Participants compared the speed of random dot kinematograms to a reference speed using lateralised response keys. On each trial, all dots moved consistently in one single direction, which varied across the experiments and could also vary from trial to trial in Experiments 2 and 4. The dot movements were left-to-right (Experiment 1), random across a 360° spectrum (Experiment 2), right-to-left (Experiment 3), and random left-to-right or right-to-left (Experiment 4). The results supported a relatively stable left-to-right spatial representation of speed (Experiments 1–3), which was compromised by mutable motion directions along the horizontal axis (Experiment 4). We suggest that representing stimuli as belonging to a single set rather than different sets, may be crucial for the emergence of spatial representations of quantities.

During social interactions, we tend to orient our visual attention towards the spatial location indicated by the gaze direction of others. However, modern societies are characterised by the increasing presence of facial stimuli of various natures, often schematic and pertaining to fictional entities, used in contexts such as advertisements or digital interfaces. In this study, we directly compared the impact of eye-gaze belonging to schematic and real faces on visual attention. These two types of stimuli were utilized in three experiments, where either manual (Experiment 1, N = 160; and Experiment 2, N = 160) or oculomotor (Experiment 3, N = 80) responses were recorded. In addition, schematic and real faces were presented either separately within two distinct blocks or intermixed within the same block of trials. The latter manipulation was aimed to test for eventual stronger differences between schematic and real faces in contexts that maximise the comparison processes between the two types of stimuli. In all experiments, a robust gaze-mediated orienting of attention effect emerged, and this was not significantly influenced by either the type of facial stimulus (i.e., schematic or real) or by the intermixed/blocked presentation. Overall, these results suggest that the human social attention system may treat both types of stimuli similarly. This finding suggests that schematic faces can be effectively used in various applied contexts, such as digital interfaces and advertising, without compromising gaze-mediated attentional orienting.

The self can be associated with arbitrary images, such as geometric figures or unknown faces. By adopting a cross-cultural perspective, we explored in two experiments whether the self can be associated with faces of unknown people from different ethnic groups. In Experiment 1, Asian Japanese participants completed a perceptual matching task, associating Asian or White faces with themselves. The same task was used in Experiment 2 with White Italians. Both experiments showed a reliable association between the self and facial stimuli. Importantly, this association was similar for both Asian and White faces. Additionally, no correlations were found between the strength of this association and an index of implicit bias towards Asian and White individuals. These results suggest that the self is malleable and can incorporate social stimuli from different groups.

It is well known that both numerical and non-numerical magnitudes can be represented horizontally from left to right. Building on this knowledge, here we explored whether a similar spatial representation exists for the economic value of goods. Participants were presented with images of a reference and a target product and classified the economic value of the target as higher or lower than that of the reference (Experiments 1 and 2), or classified the target product as belonging to the same or different semantic category as the reference (Experiment 3). Responses were collected using lateralized keys. Evidence of a SNARC-like effect for economic value emerged, whereby low economic value was associated with the left side of space, and high economic value was associated with the right side of space. Importantly, this spatial representation appeared to be based on external spatial coordinates and only emerged when the economic value was treated as an explicit dimension. Regression analyses also ruled out the potential contributions of other dimensions, such as the presumed physical weight of the target products or their valence. These findings support the hypothesis of a general magnitude representation system.

Arrows trigger reflexive shifts of attention and instantiate the prototypical example of automated symbolic orienting. We conducted four experiments to further test the boundary conditions of this phenomenon. Participants discriminated a peripheral target while spatially uninformative arrows, pointing leftwards or rightwards, appeared at fixation. In all experiments, arrow direction could either randomly vary (intermixed condition) or be kept constant within a block of trials (blocked condition). Moreover, in Experiments 3 and 4, a direction word presented at the beginning of the trial informed participants about the target location with 100% certainty. Overall, the results highlighted a significant arrow-driven orienting effect in both the blocked and the intermixed conditions. The present findings support the notion that automated symbolic orienting is resistant to suppression in that it endures even when the context should stress the uninformative nature of the arrows while also creating ideal conditions to boost participants’ tendency to ignore them.

People tend to overestimate the causal contribution of the self to the observed outcome in various situations, a cognitive bias known as the ‘illusion of control.’ This study delves into whether this cognitive bias impacts causality judgments in animations depicting physical and social causal interactions. In two experiments, participants were instructed to associate themselves and a hypothetical stranger identity with two geometrical shapes (a circle and a square). Subsequently, they viewed animations portraying these shapes assuming the roles of agent and patient in causal interactions. Within one block, the shape related to the self served as the agent, while the shape associated with the stranger played the role of the patient. Conversely, in the other block, the identity-role association was reversed. We posited that the perception of the self as a causal agent might influence explicit judgments of physical and social causality. Experiment 1 demonstrated that physical causality ratings were solely shaped by kinematic cues. In Experiment 2, emphasising social causality, the dominance of kinematic parameters was confirmed. Therefore, contrary to the hypothesis anticipating diminished causality ratings with specific identity-role associations, results indicated negligible impact of our manipulation. The study contributes to understanding the interplay between kinematic and non-kinematic cues in human causal reasoning. It suggests that explicit judgments of causality in simple animations primarily rely on low-level kinematic cues, with the cognitive bias of overestimating the self’s contribution playing a negligible role.

The processing of social information transmitted by facial stimuli is altered in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). This study investigated whether these alterations also affect the mechanisms underlying the orienting of visual attention in response to eye-gaze signals. TBI patients and a control group of healthy individuals matched on relevant criteria completed a spatial cueing task. In this task, a lateral visual target was presented along with a task-irrelevant face, with the gaze averted to the left or right. Arrows pointing towards the left or right were also used as non-social control stimuli. Social cognition abilities were further investigated through tests based on decoding emotional expressions and mental states conveyed by facial stimuli. The decoding of emotions and mental states was worse in the TBI group than in the control group. However, both groups demonstrated reliable and comparable orienting of attention to both eye-gaze and arrow stimuli. Despite impairments in certain aspects of social face processing among TBI patients, gaze cueing of attention appears to be preserved in this neuropsychological population.

Humans tend to orient their attentional resources towards the same location indicated by spatial signals coming from the others, such as pointing fingers, head turns, or eye-gaze. Here, two experiments investigated whether an attentional orienting response can be elicited even by foot cues. Participants were asked to localize a peripheral target while a task-irrelevant picture of a naked human foot, oriented leftward or rightward, was presented on the centre of the screen. The foot appeared in a neutral posture (i.e., standing upright) or an action-oriented posture (i.e., walking/running). In Experiment 1, neutral and action-oriented feet were presented in two distinct blocks, while in Experiment 2 they were presented intermixed. The results showed that the action-oriented foot, but not the neutral one, elicited an orienting response, though this only emerged in Experiment 2. This work suggests that attentional shifts can be induced by action-oriented foot cues, as long as these stimuli are made contextually salient.

Eye-gaze stimuli can elicit orienting of attention in an observer, a phenomenon known as gaze cueing of attention. Here, we explored whether gaze cueing can be shaped by the linguistic identity of the cueing face. In two experiments, participants were first familiarized with different faces together with auditory sentences. Half of the sentences were associated with the native language of the participants (Italian) and the other half with an unknown language (Albanian and Basque, in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). In a second phase, participants performed a gaze-cueing task. In a third recognition phase, the auditory sentences were presented again, and participants were required to decide which face uttered each sentence. Results indicated that participants were more likely to confuse faces from the same language category than from the other language category. Results of the gaze-cueing task revealed a greater gaze-cueing effect for faces associated with the native vs. unknown language. Critically, this difference emerged only in Experiment 1, which may reflect differences in social status between the two language groups. Our findings revealed the impact of language as a social cue on the gaze-cueing effect, suggesting that social attention is sensitive to the language of our interlocutors.

BACKGROUND:The relationships between problematic smartphone use and psychological factors have been extensively investigated. However, previous studies generally used variable-centered approaches, which hinder an examination of the heterogeneity of smartphone impact on everyday life.OBJECTIVE:In the present study, we capitalized on latent profile analysis to identify various classes of smartphone owners based on the impact associated with smartphone use (e.g., unregulated usage, preference for smartphone-mediated social relationships) and to compare these classes in terms of established psychological risk factors for problematic smartphone use.METHOD:We surveyed 934 young adults with validated psychometric questionnaires to assess the impact of smartphones, psychopathological symptoms, self-esteem and impulsivity traits.RESULTS:Smartphone users fall into four latent profiles: users with low smartphone impact, users with average smartphone impact, problematic smartphone users, and users favoring online interactions. Individuals distributed in the problematic smartphone user profile were characterized by heightened psychopathological symptoms (stress, anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive tendencies) and impulsivity traits. Moreover, users who preferred online interactions exhibited the highest symptoms of social anxiety and the lowest levels of self-esteem.CONCLUSIONS:These findings further demonstrate the multidimensionality and heterogeneity of the impact of smartphone use, calling for tailored prevention and intervention strategies.