Social Attention in Diverse Social Worlds: Biculturalism, Racial Diversity, and Regional Culture Shape Gaze Cueing Behaviour

Observing a directional gaze triggers an attention shift in the same direction as that gaze, also known as gaze cueing. Given that gaze cueing has been observed in human infants and monkeys, it is considered a universally evolved mechanism that provides the foundation for learning about one’s social world. Recent research, however, suggests that some features of gaze cueing may be shaped by culture. One such feature is whether the gaze cueing effect is interrupted by gazes embedded in the background (i.e., social context). In this dissertation, I unpack how biculturalism, racial diversity, and regional cultures can influence the extent to which gaze cueing from a focal gaze is interrupted by gazes in the social context. This dissertation uses a multi-gaze cueing task, in which a central foreground gaze and four background gazes are presented, and gaze cueing from the foreground gaze is measured. Chapter Two presents two experiments that test whether priming interdependent vs. independent self-construals can influence gaze cueing by increasing or decreasing interference from the background gazes in two different cultural populations. We found that interdependent self-construal priming was effective for bicultural East Asian Canadians, but not monocultural European Canadians. These findings suggest that being bicultural may provide the necessary long-term experience of shifting between different modes of social attention to allow self-construal primes to be effective. Chapter Three presents two experiments that test whether the social attention system prioritizes proximal features of the social environment, such as racial makeup. Across both experiments, East Asian Canadians, East Asians from East Asia, and European-descent North Americans exhibited greater attention to the gazes of own- vs. other-race faces in an ensemble coding manner. These findings suggest that gaze cueing is driven by perceived race. Chapter Four presents a comparison of gaze cueing behaviour across two extensively examined regions, North America and East Asia, and two less explored regions, and Middle East and South Asia. Results suggest that East Asians’ gaze cueing is interrupted by the gazes in the social context to a greater extent than North Americans. Middle Easterners and South Asians display “intermediate” levels of interference from the social context between East Asians and North Americans. Altogether, this dissertation presents evidence that social attention is shaped by cultural experiences found within and across regions.