Journal
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 33, Issue 9, Pages 1532-1540Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/09567976221094628
Keywords
social attention; working memory; eye gaze; arrows
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Previous research has shown that internally maintained social cues in working memory can induce attentional orienting, which cannot be solely explained by perceptual-attentional processes. Non-social cues, such as arrows, do not elicit a similar attentional-orienting effect as social cues when held in working memory.
Previous research has shown that social cues, including eye gaze, can readily guide our focus of attention-a phenomenon referred to as social attention. Here, we demonstrated that internally maintained social cues in working memory (WM) can produce an analogous attentional effect (N = 57). Using the delayed-match-to-sample paradigm combined with the dot-probe task, we found that holding irrelevant gaze cues in WM can induce attentional orienting in college-age adults. Importantly, this WM-induced attention effect could not be explained simply by the perceptual-attentional process, because the identical gaze cues that were only passively viewed and not memorized in WM could not trigger attentional orienting beyond the typical time window of social attention. Furthermore, nonsocial cues (i.e., arrows) held in WM failed to elicit the attentional-orienting effect. These findings provide new evidence for the conceptualization of WM as internally directed attention and highlight the uniqueness of social attention compared with nonsocial attention.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available