Will Eye Follow You? Initiating Joint Attention Modulates Affective Evaluations and Social Attention

Initiating joint attention is just as important for development and social cognition as responding to the joint attention bids of others (i.e. gaze following). Despite its significance, the social-cognitive impact of initiating joint attention in adults is understudied. We employed a gaze-contingent paradigm whereby participants' eye movements were used to control the gaze of a face presented on the screen: The face could either follow the eyes of the participant, or look in the opposite direction. In Experiments 1a and 1b, different individual faces either engaged or rejected joint attention bids. Whether it was a consistent Joint Attention or Non-joint Attention face influenced face dwell times and a measure of social referencing. Participants also showed a preference for the Joint Attention faces. The same participants immediately completed Experiment 2, which investigated the influence of prior joint attention behaviour on gaze-cueing of attention. All previously-viewed faces either looked towards a target (valid) or away from the target (invalid). Interestingly, stronger cueing effects emerged for the Non-joint Attention faces as compared with the Joint Attention faces. That is, participants followed the gaze of faces that had previously rejected their bids for joint attention during Experiment 1. These results illustrate the important interactions among joint attention, facial identity recognition and gaze perception