Social Attention as a General Mechanism? Demonstrating the Influence of Stimulus Content Factors on Social Attentional Biasing

Humans spontaneously attend to faces and eyes. Recent findings, however, suggest that this social attentional biasing may not be driven by the social value of faces but by general factors, like stimulus content, visual context, or task settings. Here, we investigated whether the stimulus content factors of global luminance, featural configuration, and perceived attractiveness may independently drive social attentional biasing. Six experiments were run. In each, participants completed a dot-probe task where the presentation of a face, a house, and two neutral images was followed by the presentation of a response target at one of those locations. Experiments 1 and 2 assessed social attentional biasing when the face had higher overall global luminance. Experiments 3 and 4 assessed social attentional biasing when the face (but not the comparison house) retained the typical canonical configuration of internal features. Experiments 5 and 6 examined social attentional biasing when the face was more attractive than the house. Experiments 1, 3, and 5 measured manual responses when participants were instructed to maintain fixation. Experiments 2, 4, and 6 measured both manual and oculomotor responses when no instructions about eye movements were provided. The results indicated no reliable social attentional biasing in Experiments 1 to 5, however, a reliable saccadic bias toward the eyes of attractive upright faces was found in Experiment 6. Together, these results show that perceived facial attractiveness may be an important general factor in social attentional biasing.