Social Attention Triggered by Eye Gaze and Walking Direction Is Resistant to Temporal Decay

The attentional orienting induced by social cues, such as eye gaze and walking direction of biological motion, plays a vital role in human survival and interpersonal interactions. It has long been debated whether this indispensable ability is unique and intrinsically distinct from nonsocial attention. In the current study, we characterized the temporal profiles of the attentional orienting triggered by social cues (i.e., eye gaze and walking direction) and compared them with those induced by nonsocial cues (i.e., arrows) and exogenous cues using a covert orienting task. We calculated the attentional cuing effects in the early and the late periods of the task and further carried out a time course analysis to characterize their dynamic changes over trials. Whereas the cuing effect induced by nonsocial cues exhibited a significant trend of temporal decay, the cuing effects induced by the two different social cues were similar and remained stable throughout the task, resembling that induced by reflexive exogenous cues. These results clearly demonstrate that the socially coordinated attentional orienting is a highly reflexive and temporally stable response, which is less susceptible to top-down cognitive control and substantially distinguished from the attentional orienting induced by nonsocial cues. These findings extend our understandings of the distinction between social and nonsocial attention and further substantiate the specificity of social attentional orienting from a temporal-stability perspective. Public Significance Statement Social attention is vital for human survival and interpersonal interactions, which may differ from nonsocial attention in many aspects. Here, we show from a novel, temporal-stability perspective that the social attentional orienting induced by eye gaze or biological motion remains temporally stable as the task proceeds, resembling reflexive attentional orienting induced by exogenous cues. By contrast, nonsocial attentional orienting induced by arrows exhibits a significant trend of decay. The findings extend our understandings of the distinction between social and nonsocial attention from a temporal view, and suggest a stricter criterion that takes temporal stability into consideration, when testing the reflexive nature of attentional orienting.