Dyadic learning shapes gaze-mediated social attentional orienting

People tend to automatically shift their attention in response to social cues, such as eye gaze-a phenomenon known as social attentional orienting, which is crucial for adaptive social behaviors and interpersonal communication. While this ability is genetically influenced and typically stable, the current research shows that it can be enhanced within a specific social context by dyadic learning. We engaged pairs of participants in a standard gaze-cuing task, during which they received instant feedback on each other's performance. Unbeknownst to the participants, the feedback was designed to create a social context in which the partner appeared to respond to the cued location faster than the participant. We found that such a social context significantly increased the magnitude of gaze cuing effect. Importantly, the observed enhancement was not attributable to confounding factors such as arousal level or overall performance difference, nor to implicit learning from the feedback structure. Instead, drift-diffusion model analysis suggested that such a social context improved both the initial attentional orienting process and the sustained allocation of processing resources to the gazed-at location, resulting in a stronger gaze cuing effect. A subsequent experiment replaced gaze cues with non-social arrow cues and observed no modulatory effect, underscoring the distinction between social and non-social attentional orienting. The current research provides compelling evidence that social attentional orienting is malleable and highlights the significant impact of dyadic learning in shaping this capability.