Following and leading social gaze

Andrew is from the School of Psychology at the University of East Anglia. After gaining his PhD in Bangor, he moved to the University of Queensland in Australia before moving back to the UK. He has a number of research interests, the most significant of these is the topic of his talk; social attention.

Abstract :
When we see someone suddenly move their eyes, our attention is automatically drawn to where they are looking. This establishes a state of ‘joint attention’, which serves a variety of social functions. In the talk, I will give an overview of my work that has primarily used the ‘gaze cueing’ paradigm to investigate joint attention in the laboratory. Gaze cueing is demonstrated by the observation that participants show faster reaction times to visual targets that appear at cued, relative to uncued, locations. There is also a context-dependant impact of gaze cueing on affective evaluations whereby objects that are looked at by others are preferred to objects that are do not receive social attention. Finally I will introduce some new work in which instead of investigating the ‘gaze follower’, I reverse the roles to investigate the influence of ‘gaze leading’ on social attention and affective evaluations.