Sex Differences in Attentional Selection Following Gaze and Arrow Cues
Metadatos
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Frontiers Media
Materia
Attentional selection Gaze-cueing Theory of mind Autistic quotient Sex differences
Date
2020-02-14Referencia bibliográfica
Chacón-Candia JA, Lupiáñez J, Casagrande M and Marotta A (2020) Sex Differences in Attentional Selection Following Gaze and Arrow Cues. Front. Psychol. 11:95. [doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00095]
Patrocinador
Supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness research projects (PSI2017-84926-P and PSI2014-52764-P) to JL, Juan de la Cierva fellowships IJCI-2014- 21113 to AMRésumé
Although most studies on social attention have shown undistinguishable attentional
effects in response to eye-gaze and arrow cues, recent research has found that whereas
the orienting of attention triggered by eye-gaze is directed to the specific position,
or part of the object looked at, arrows unselectively elicit attention toward parts of
the environment. However, it is unclear whether this dissociation between gaze and
arrow cues is related to social cognitive mechanisms such as mental state attribution
(Theory of Mind, ToM). We aimed at replicating the dissociation between gaze and
arrow cues and investigating if the attentional object selection elicited by these two
types of stimuli differs depending on the sex of observers. To make our research plan
transparent, our hypotheses, together with the plans of analyses, were registered before
data exploration. While we replicated the arrow–gaze dissociation, this was equivalent in
the male and female population. These results seem to contradict the intuition that ToM
skills can be associated with the differences observed between orienting to eyes and
arrows since greater ToM abilities have been generally shown in females. However, this
conclusion must be interpreted with caution, since, in our sample, it was not possible to
observe any differences in autistic quotient scores and ToM abilities between male and
female participants. Further research is needed in order to clarify this issue.