Jessica Savoie¹, Jelena Ristic¹; ¹McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Humans spontaneously follow where others are looking, with this process in groups modulated by the number of consistent gaze cues. In groups of three, a minority of consistent gaze cues facilitates target responses; in groups of five, a majority of consistent cues is needed for similar response facilitation. Are such evaluative processes unique to gaze cues? We investigated this question in two preregistered experiments in which participants responded to targets cued by a group of three (E1, N=156) or five (E2, N=154) faces or visually matched directional arrows. Participants saw a group of cues at fixation and identified a peripheral target appearing on the left or right of the group. The target location could be cued by 0, 1, 2 or 3 cues in Experiment 1 or by 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 cues in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, faster overall responses occurred in response to gaze relative to arrow cues, while reliable target facilitation tracked with increasing consistent cue numerosity for both cue types. In Experiment 2, target facilitation also tracked with increasing cue numerosity for both cue types with no overall differences in speed of responding for gaze and arrow cues. Interestingly, while for gaze cues, targets were reliably facilitated by one, two, and three consistent cues, there were no differences in responses between three and four consistent gaze cues. In contrast, for arrow cues, target facilitation followed a linear trend of reliable facilitation with increasing cue numerosity. These results show that while target responses can be facilitated by the minority of consistent biological and directional cues, responses are also modulated by group size and show nuanced effects across biological cue consistency increases. As such, these results highlight the sensitivity of human perceptual and attentional processes to the complexity of visual information in multi-agent contexts.

Acknowledgements: NSERC, FRQNT,SSHRC