Executive control of attentional capture by faces and eye-gaze cueing
Lead Research Organisation:
Liverpool John Moores University
Department Name: Natural Sciences and Psychology
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Anna Law (Principal Investigator / Fellow) |
Publications
Anna Law (author)
(1900)
The role of working memory in eye-gaze cueing
Law A
(2010)
Assessing the impact of verbal and visuospatial working memory load on eye-gaze cueing
in Visual Cognition
| Description | The attention of an observer will shift reflexively to a location indicated by the eye-gaze direction of another person, even when the observer is performing other cognitive tasks at the same time, specifically: 1) maintaining verbal information in working memory, 2) monitoring and updating verbal information in working memory and 3) maintaining and manipulating visuo-spatial information in working memory. Observers will attend to a face preferentially above other types of object that may appear in competition with it. However, this bias may not arise (or may take longer to arise) when observers are maintaining verbal information in working memory. Nevertheless, visual attention biases towards faces and eye gaze are persistent, and appear not to be readily modulated by the maintenance and manipulation of information in working memory. |
| Exploitation Route | One aim of this Fellowship was to test a number of different combinations of primary (social attention) tasks and secondary (working memory) tasks. The pre-load (digit rehearsal) procedure was found to combine well with the primary tasks and variations of this, perhaps using visuo-spatial information instead of verbal information, would be a useful direction for future research. Further studies using the auditory matrix task may also prove fruitful. Consideration should also be given to the circumstances in which participants initially encounter the primary task - although this was not an explicit aim of the Fellowship, there were indications in the data from the attention capture studies that this may be an important factor, and experiments specifically designed to investigate this issue would be welcome. Although there was little evidence here that facial identity was an important factor, facial emotion does appear to strengthen social attention biases, at least for high-anxiety participants, so there may be scope to examine the impact of different types of WM load on attention to emotional faces. The work pursued during the term of this Fellowship has provided a foundation on which to build future programmes of in-depth studies, by identifying those methods with the greatest promise in terms of investigating the role of working memory and executive control in attention to faces and eye-gaze. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) |
| Description | This project was basic scientific research, and as such broader cultural, societal or economic impact would not be expected. |