Katie L.H. Gray¹, Mahsa Barzy^1,2, Nicholas Hedger¹, Eugene McSorley¹, Richard Cook³; ¹University of Reading, ²University of Kent, ³University of Leeds

When viewed from a third-person perspective, the same individuals are processed differently depending on whether they are presented in an intact (e.g. face-to-face) or broken (e.g. back-to-back) interaction. One account proposes that observing an interaction engages specialised social processing mechanisms. Another proposes that the effect is driven by attentional cueing, where individuals within the interaction draw attention toward the centre of the interaction when they face each other, but attention is dispersed across the scene when they do not. Although different behavioural experiments have interrogated this effect, relatively few have used eye-tracking. In this study, we presented pairs of facing and non-facing people and arrows, allowing us to investigate how overt attention is modulated by their arrangement and the domain specificity of any effects found. On each trial, participants (N = 31) were presented with pairs of people or arrows whilst we tracked their eye-movements. We defined areas of interest corresponding to the heads and bodies of the two stimuli, and the space between them. A time course analysis showed that the area between the stimuli attracted more attention when the stimuli were facing each other than when they were not, for both people and arrows. Notably, this effect emerged earlier for the arrow stimuli than for people. These findings suggest that overt attention differs between interacting and non-interacting individuals, and that a similar pattern occurs for non-social directional cues. Overall, the results indicate that attention contributes to the processing of social interactions in a domain-general manner, potentially driven by attentional cueing.

Acknowledgements: The research described was funded by the Leverhulme Trust to KLHG (RPG-2019–394, and RPG-2024–245).