Gaze Cuing, Familiarity, and the Self

Abstract

Attention researchers have known for over a decade that people have a tendency to shift their attention automatically to a location gazed at by another person (e.g., Friesen & Kingstone, 1998). This social orienting appears to be reflexive in nature, and yet it also seems to be influenced by contextual factors and individual differences (for a review, see Frischen & Tipper, 2007). In the present document, I investigated how the familiarity of the gaze cue provider influences individuals' tendency to shift attention to a gazed-at location. The main questions addressed in the research are: (1) What is the role of familiarity in responding to gaze direction? and (2) If an effect of familiarity is observed, does it generalize to the situation of orienting in response to one1s own gaze direction? My results indicated that participants did orient to a gaze cue provided by their own face, as well as to gaze cues provided by the faces of a friend and a same-sex stranger. Findings which address the roles of the familiarity of the gazing face and of individual differences (i.e., self-esteem, autistic tendencies) among participants will also be discussed.