Task instructions can accelerate the early preference for social features in naturalistic scenes

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Humans exhibit a rapid, reflexive prioritization of social features, particularly heads and faces, in naturalistic scenes, regardless of physical saliency.
• Existing research suggests this social prioritization is largely automatic during free viewing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if the prioritization of social elements in naturalistic scenes can be further accelerated by top-down instructions.
• To determine if goal-directed attention enhances the speed and strength of orienting towards social cues.

Main Methods:

• Participants viewed naturalistic scenes containing social features (heads, bodies) while their eye movements were recorded.
• Two viewing conditions were employed: free viewing and a task-oriented condition requiring rapid detection of people.

Main Results:

• Social elements, especially heads, were preferentially fixated over physically salient image features, confirming previous findings.
• Instructing participants to detect people significantly enhanced and accelerated the orienting towards social elements.
• This acceleration effect was most pronounced for heads and was observable from the initial eye fixation.

Conclusions:

• The prioritization of social features in naturalistic scenes is partly driven by reflexive processes.
• Top-down attentional instructions can further enhance and speed up these reflexive mechanisms for social cue prioritization.
• The rapid orienting towards social information, particularly heads, is a robust phenomenon modulated by both bottom-up salience and top-down goals.