Measuring the effect of social knowledge on social attention by using gaze cueing effect

This thesis examines the socio-cognitive variables that effects eye gaze following in neurotypical adults. Existing literature defined these socio-cognitive variables by showing visual representations or changing physical features of the observed gazer. However, in real world interactions, social relations are not only defined by visual awareness but also observes pre-existing memories. This is particularly important for laboratory based social attention studies that conducted in highly controlled environment since, it might cause losing the social context behind the social relations by only focus on visual attentional effects. Three experiments conducted to see if the gaze cueing effect would be enhanced by the information that participants know about the gazer face. Study one showed that, although participants did not have any knowledge about the gazer face besides which group they belong, they significantly reported themselves to be in the same group with in-group condition compared to out-group condition. But, this did not affect the strength of gaze cueing. Participants showed similar gaze following both to in-group and out-group faces. In study two, perceived social power manipulated in dangerous scenario and results indicated that female participants were more sensitive to social stimuli in dangerous situations. Study three, focused on observation of a person as a leader or a follower in group context. This study conducted with neurotypical females to see the effect of autistic traits in social attention as a continuum. Finding suggested that leadership manipulation was effective at the first observation, but this effect did not manipulate later social attention encounters with the observed face. Altogether, results suggested that visual awareness of social context was important to create the social categorization in computer-based gaze cueing tasks.