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Updated: Jul 6, 2025
07:36
Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
Published on: November 30, 2018
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Don't look now! Social elements are harder to avoid during scene viewing.
A P Martinez-Cedillo1, T Foulsham2
1Department of Psychology, University of York, York YO10 5DD, England; Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ, England.
Vision Research
|January 7, 2024
Summary
It is difficult to avoid looking at people, even when instructed. Our study shows a strong bias towards social information in real-world scenes, impacting attention.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Social Neuroscience
- Visual Attention
Background:
- Social information, such as the presence of people, captures attention in real-world scenes.
- The automaticity of this social attention bias and its interaction with other attentional cues remain unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the automaticity of attention towards social stimuli.
- To examine how effectively individuals can suppress attention to social information when instructed.
Main Methods:
- Eye movements were recorded while participants viewed scenes.
- Participants were instructed to explicitly avoid looking at a specific object (either a person or a non-social object).
Main Results:
- Participants made errors in following instructions, particularly on the initial eye movement (saccade).
- Erroneous looks towards people were approximately twice as frequent as towards non-social objects.
Conclusions:
- Prioritization of social information during scene viewing is difficult to suppress.
- Social information is perceived and attended to quickly and automatically, influencing visual processing.
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