Exploring the role of interlocutor identity on social attention

Eye-gaze stimuli can elicit orienting of attention in an observer (i.e., gaze-cueing of attention). Increasing evidence has shown that social factors modulate this phenomenon. At the same time, language has recently been considered a critical-cue for social categorization. Here, we explored the role of linguistic identity in the gaze-cueing effect. Italian native participants were familiarized with Caucasian faces together with auditory sentences. Half of the faces were associated with Italian (native-language) and the other half with an unknown language (Albanian, Exp.1, N=48; Basque, Exp.2, N=48). Participants then performed a gaze-cueing task (i.e., they discriminated a target located in congruent or incongruent positions according to gaze-direction) using the faces as cueing stimuli. Finally, the auditory sentences were presented again, and participants decided which face uttered each sentence. Results indicated that participants categorized faces according to the language they spoke, replicating the role of language in social categorization. In addition, results revealed a greater gaze-cueing effect for ‘Italian’ faces versus ‘Albanian’ faces (Exp.1), while similar gaze-cueing effects were observed between ‘Italian’ and ‘Basque’ faces (Exp.2). Results will be discussed also taking into account: a complementary attentional mechanism (attention-holding); and ii) another social factor: trustfulness of the speaker.