ABSTRACT

Social attention is the ability to share with social partners the attentional focus on an object and to orient attentional resources after observing others’ behaviors. In the present work, we analyzed whether social threat may influence social attention during the observation of social agents’ reach-to-grasp movements. In two experimental studies, we adopted a Posner-like paradigm: participants were required to classify neutral stimuli appearing in a congruent or incongruent position with the actor’s movement. Membership (ingroup vs. outgroup) and contextual cues (neutral vs. threatening objects) were manipulated. The results showed a robust action-cueing effect: responses to stimuli in a congruent position with the actor’s action were faster than responses to incongruent stimuli. Interestingly, we found a stronger effect for the threatening outgroup (i.e., Iraqi) than for the ingroup (i.e., Italian), especially in presence of menacing objects. No effects were found when observing the non-threatening outgroup (i.e., Japanese).

摘要

社会关注是与社会伙伴分享对一个对象的关注焦点，并在观察他人行为后定位注意力资源的能力。在目前的工作中，我们分析了在观察社会主体的伸手可及的运动过程中，社会威胁是否会影响社会注意力。在两项实验研究中，我们采用了类似波斯纳的范式：要求参与者对出现在与演员动作一致或不一致的位置的中性刺激进行分类。成员资格（内群与外群）和上下文线索（中性与威胁对象）被操纵。结果显示出强大的动作提示效应：对与演员动作一致的刺激的反应比对不一致刺激的反应更快。有趣的是，我们发现威胁性的外群（即伊拉克人）比内群（即意大利人）的影响更强，尤其是在存在威胁性物体的情况下。观察无威胁的外群（即日本人）时没有发现任何影响。