Abstract: The phenomenon that human tend to shift their attention to the corresponding direction in which others are looking is known as gaze cueing. This fundamental behavior is modulated by threats which the facial social clues and visual clues implying. Compared with the threatening visual information, the threatening social information may be processed preferentially. However, existing studies have not clarified whether this priority effect appears in gaze cueing. The present study addressed this question by manipulating the perceptual load and using the gaze cueing paradigm. In experiment 1, participants were asked to memorize the identities of different faces, and then judge the targets under different facial conditions to verify whether they were more likely to follow faces with threatening social information than threatening visual information. In experiment 2, the processing characteristics of different threats were investigated by manipulating perceptual load. The results showed that: at the low load condition, it did not show the processing advantage of threatening social information; however, at the high load condition, the faces with only threatening social information enhanced the gaze cueing for male. While for female, the effects of threats on gaze cueing disappeared. In conclusion, these results revealed that for male, the threatening social information were processed preferentially in gaze cueing. For female, processing of both two kinds of threat were modulated by the attention resource.

Key words:  gaze cueing, perceptual load, threats, gaze cueing paradigm