The General Mechanism of Status: The Impact of Perceptual and Knowledge-Based Social Status on Selective Attention

Social status, a fundamental dimension of human social life, shapes access to resources and opportunities and influences how individuals perceive and interact with others. Perceivers can infer others’ social status from both perceptual cues (e.g., clothing) and knowledge-based cues (e.g., biographical information), yet it remains unclear whether and how these distinct types of status cues influence early-stage attentional selection. To address this question, the present study employed a modified two-rectangle paradigm to examine the effects of social status on space- and object-based attention. Social status was manipulated via perceptual cues (Experiment 1: upper-body clothing) and knowledge-based cues (Experiment 2: fictive biographies), and three stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs: 100, 300, and 500 ms) were included to capture the temporal dynamics. The results showed that both perceptual and knowledge-based status selectively modulated object-based attention at the 300 ms SOA, with comparable effect magnitudes, whereas space-based attention remained unaffected. These findings suggest that social status operates as a higher-order modulatory factor that selectively influences object-based attentional selection within a temporally constrained window. Moreover, the comparable effects of perceptual and knowledge-based cues support the notion that different types of status cues are integrated into a general representational format that guides attentional priority.