Exploring Social Cues in Spatial Attention: A Conditional Accuracy Function Approach

This study delves into social orienting mechanisms in social attention research, focusing on how social stimuli like gaze and non-social stimuli such as arrows affect attention direction. Using a distributional analysis of accuracy in function of response latencies via the Conditional Accuracy Function (CAF) tool, we synthesized findings from eleven studies employing a social variant of the spatial Stroop Task. This led to three distinct models, each examining accuracy rates across reaction time distributions segmented into bins and various target conditions, including cropped eyes, full faces as social stimuli, and arrows as non-social stimuli. We employed k-fold cross-validation, confirming linear-mixed modelling was more effective than both beta and binomial regression models for analyzing CAFs across models. Hierarchical model comparisons further enhance our analysis by enabling us to identify the models that best fit the data. The results reveal a significant interaction between target type, congruency, and bin, particularly at the fastest response times. Here, social stimuli significantly diverged from non-social ones, showing higher accuracy rates in incongruent than congruent conditions, a trend not seen with non-social targets. Models incorporating three-way interactions, such as the Global Model, which contrasts social and non-social stimuli, and another model that differentiates between arrows, eyes, and faces, outperformed simpler models in performance. Notably, adding emotional expressions as a predictor in a model centered on facial stimuli significantly enhanced model fit, underscoring the impact of emotional expressions on attentional dynamics within the fastest responses of the distribution. This research contributes to the broader debate in social attention by evidentially mapping the connections between temporal dynamics and social factors in directing attention. Our findings help to understand the role of social cues, notably eye-gaze, in modulating attention, potentially through shared and unique mechanisms.