Groups of people offer abundant opportunities for social interactions. We used a two-phase task to investigate how social cue numerosity and social information about an individual affected attentional allocation in such multi-agent settings. The learning phase was a standard gaze-cuing procedure in which a stimulus face could be either uninformative or informative about the upcoming target. The test phase was a group-cuing procedure in which the stimulus faces from the learning phase were presented in groups of three. The target could either be cued by the group minority (i.e., one face) or majority (i.e., two faces) or by uninformative or informative stimulus faces. Results showed an effect of cue numerosity, whereby responses were faster to targets cued by the group majority than the group minority. However, responses to targets cued by informative identities included in the group minority were as fast as responses to targets cued by the group majority. Thus, previously learned social information about an individual was able to offset the general enhancement of cue numerosity, revealing a complex interplay between cue numerosity and social information in guiding attention in multi-agent settings.

人群为社交互动提供了丰富的机会。我们使用了一个两阶段的任务来研究社会线索数量和关于个人的社会信息如何影响这种多智能体环境中的注意力分配。学习阶段是标准的凝视提示程序，其中刺激面部可能对即将到来的目标没有提供信息或提供信息。测试阶段是一个小组提示程序，其中来自学习阶段的刺激面孔以三人一组的形式呈现。目标可以由群体少数（即一张脸）或多数（即两张脸）或无信息或信息刺激的面孔来提示。结果显示了线索数量的影响，即对多数群体提示的目标的反应比少数群体更快。然而，对包含在少数群体中的信息身份暗示的目标的反应与对群体多数暗示的目标的反应一样快。因此，先前学到的关于个人的社会信息能够抵消线索数量的普遍增强，揭示了线索数量与社会信息之间复杂的相互作用，在多智能体环境中引导注意力。