Attentional Selection of Social Features Persists Despite Restricted Bottom-Up Information and Affects Temporal Viewing Dynamics

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Previous studies have shown an attentional bias towards social features during free-viewing of naturalistic scenes. This social attention seems to be reflexive and able to defy top-down demands in form of explicit search tasks. However, the question remains whether social features continue to be prioritized when peripheral information is limited, thereby reducing the influence of bottom-up image information on gaze orienting. Therefore, we established a gaze-contingent viewing paradigm, in which the visual field was constrained and updated in response to the viewer's eye movements. Participants viewed social and non-social images that were randomly allocated to a free and a gaze-contingent viewing condition while their eye movements were tracked. Our results revealed a strong attentional bias towards social features in both conditions. However, gaze-contingent viewing altered temporal and spatial dynamics of viewing behavior. Additionally, recurrent fixations were more frequent and closer together in time for social compared to non-social stimuli in both viewing conditions. Taken together, this study implies a predominant selection of social features when bottom-up influences are diminished and a general influence of social content on visual exploratory behavior, thus highlighting mechanisms of social attention.