Belén Aranda-Martín

Gaze acts from an early age as a cue to orient attention and, thereafter, to infer our social partners' intentions, thoughts, and emotions. Variants of the attentional orienting paradigm have been used to study the orienting capabilities associated to eye gaze. However, to date, it is still unclear whether this methodology truly assesses an attribute of social cognition in this stimulus. The present study provides a comprehensive meta-analysis showing that nonsocial directional stimuli, such as arrows, produce an effect identical to that of eye gaze, indicating that orienting triggered by this social cue may be reflecting a domain-general orienting rather than a specialized mechanism of social cognition. Nonetheless, biologically relevant stimuli may induce additional higher-order processes of a social nature, which might only be observed with more specific experimental procedures that analyse qualitative rather than quantitative differences. Data from those paradigms support the existence of common and specific attentional mechanisms triggered by gaze. Finally, we offer some conclusions about the nature of extra-social cognition processes specifically triggered by eye gaze.

Background. We investigated whether individuals with high levels of autistic traits integrate relevant communicative signals, such as facial expression, when decoding eye-gaze direction. Methods. Students with high vs. low scores on the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) performed a task in which they responded to the eye directions of faces, presented on the left or the right side of a screen, portraying different emotional expressions. Results. In both groups, the identification of gaze direction was faster when the eyes were directed towards the center of the scene. However, in the low AQ group, this effect was larger for happy faces than for neutral faces or faces showing other emotional expressions, whereas participants from high AQ group were not affected by emotional expressions. Conclusions. These results suggest that individuals with more autistic traits may not integrate multiple communicative signals based on their emotional value.

From early ages, gaze acts as a cue to infer the interests, behaviours, thoughts and emotions of social partners. Despite sharing attentional properties with other non‐social directional stimuli, such as arrows, gaze produces unique effects. A spatial interference task revealed this dissociation. The direction of arrows was identified faster on congruent than on incongruent direction‐location trials. Conversely, gaze produced a reversed congruency effect (RCE), with faster identifications on incongruent than congruent trials. To determine the emergence of these gaze‐specific attentional mechanisms, 214 Spanish children (4–17 years) divided into 6 age groups, performed the aforementioned task across three experiments. Results showed stimulus‐specific developmental trajectories. Whereas the standard effect of arrows was unaffected by age, gaze shifted from an arrow‐like effect at age 4 to a gaze‐specific RCE at age 12. The orienting mechanisms shared by gaze and arrows are already present in 4‐year olds and, throughout childhood, gaze becomes a special social cue with additional attentional properties. Besides orienting attention to a direction, as arrows would do, gaze might orient attention towards a specific object that would be attentionally selected. Such additional components may not fully develop until adolescence. Understanding gaze‐specific attentional mechanisms may be crucial for children with atypical socio‐cognitive development.

We investigated whether individuals with high levels of autistic traits integrate relevant communicative signals, such as facial expression, when decoding eye-gaze direction. Students with high vs. low scores on the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) performed a task in which they responded to the eyes’ direction of faces, presented on the left or the right side of the screen, portraying different emotional expressions. In both groups, the identification of gaze direction was faster when the eyes were directed towards the center of the scene. However, only in the low AQ group, this effect was larger for happy faces than for neutral faces or faces showing other emotional expressions. High AQ participants were not affected by emotional expressions. These results suggested that individuals with more autistic traits may do not integrate multiple communicative signals based on their emotional value.