Studying Voluntary and Reflexive Mechanisms of Visual Attention: An Investigation of the Robustness of the Social Attention Bias

Abstract

Social attention refers to a perceptual prioritization of social information and a tendency to quickly direct attention towards social stimuli. However, the extent to which social attention follows reflexive mechanisms rather than reflecting top-down control remains elusive. Here we examined the robustness of social orienting when challenged by competing top-down modulations of attention induced by motivationally relevant operant conditioning. We conducted two consecutive experiments (both N = 52) with data for Experiment 1 being collected in December 2023 and January 2024 and data for Experiment 2 from April – May 2024. Using a gaze-contingent paradigm, we explored whether humans could learn to suppress directing their overt visual attention towards specific stimuli when such behavior is associated with an aversive outcome, such as an aversive electric shock (Experiment 1) or a loss of points (Experiment 2). We observed reflexive social attention characterized by faster and more frequent saccades only for positively conditioned faces but neither for stimuli that required avoidance nor for novel stimuli. Overall, these results suggest that bottom-up attentional mechanisms such as social prioritization or a novelty bias are less automatic and reflexive than previously assumed and can be suppressed through executive control to support goal-directed behavior.