Studying the influence of race on the gaze cueing effect using eye tracking method

Abstract

The gaze direction of another person is an important social cue, allowing us to orient quickly in social interactions. The effect of short-term redirection of visual attention to the same object that other people are looking at is known as the gaze cueing effect. There is evidence that the strength of this effect depends on many social factors, such as the trust in a partner, her/his gender, social attitudes, etc. In our study we investigated the influence of race of face stimuli on the strength of the gaze cueing effect. Using the modified Posner Cueing Task an attentional shift was assessed in a scene where avatar faces of different race were used as distractors. Participants were instructed to fix the black dot in the centre of the screen until it changes colour, and then as soon as possible to make a rightward or leftward saccade, depending on colour of a fixed point. A male distractor face was shown in the centre of the screen simultaneously with a fixed point. The gaze direction of the distractor face changed from straight ahead to rightward or leftward at the moment when colour of a fixed point changed. It could be either congruent or incongruent with the saccade direction. We used face distractors of three race categories: Caucasian (own race faces), Asian and African (other race faces). Twenty five Caucasian participants took part in our study. The results showed that the race of face distractors influence the strength of the gaze cueing effect, that manifested in the change of latency and velocity of the ongoing saccades.

Keywords

• saccadic latency
• eye movements
• gaze-cueing effect
• own-race effect
• social attention
• face perception