The difference between social attention and non-social attention lies in attention disengagement rather than attention orientation

Whether the attention triggered by social cues and non-social cues share the same mechanism has been a controversial topic. While most previous studies focused on the process of attention orientation, this study examined the difference between social and non-social attention in attention disengagement. We developed a two-stage attention-orientation paradigm and used eye-tracking to detailed capture the attention-disengagement process. In the first stage, the gaze/arrow directed participants’ attention to an object where the target appeared in high probability. In the second stage, a Landolt-C appeared and participants needed to respond to its direction. In most trials, the Landolt-C appeared in the attended object. In other trials, the Landolt-C appeared at a random location outside the object, participants needed to disengage their attention from the previous-attended object and redirect to the target. Both Experiments 1 and 2 adopted this two-stage attention-orientation paradigm. Experiment 1 used schematic stimuli (gaze, arrow, object), while Experiment 2 used real-life stimuli and put them in real-scene backgrounds. The results of both experiments showed that there was no difference in the attention-orientation stage: the gaze and arrow directed participants’ attention into the object simultaneously. However, when the participants needed to disengage their attention from the previous-attended object, the gaze cue led to a faster disengagement than arrow, indicating that social attention was more flexible and less trapped in objects. To explore the mechanism of social attention’s faster disengagement, Experiment 3 required participants to search the whole real scenes made of objects and backgrounds for a Landolt-C followed by gaze/arrow cues. Results showed that during the whole searching process, social attention was less trapped in objects than non-social attention, indicating social attention was less distracted by task-irrelevant objects. To conclude, our research supported that social attention was more flexible and disengaged more efficiently from the previous-attended object.