Modulation of Gaze Cueing by Social Information Contained in Faces and ItsNeural Mechanisms

Eye gaze,as a type of unique nonverbal social cues,can trigger a reflexive attentional orienting effectthat is crucial for human adaptive social behaviors.Adopting the central cueing paradigm and its variants,recentstudies have been increasingly focused on the modulation of social information conveyed by faces,especiallyfacial expressions,on this attentional effect.Specifically,facial expressions communicate other individuals'internal affective states.When combined with gaze direction,they could reliably indicate others'affectiveevaluation regarding the nature of the relevant object of interest and therefore modulate the gaze-triggeredattentional effect.Such emotional modulation varies for different types of emotions and is more salient for fear and anger.Additionally,it would be further influenced by task-relevant(i.e.,task dynamics,target valence)andindividual factors(i.e.,anxiety,fearfulness,autistic quotient,and social cognitive disorders).This modulationeffect emerges from infancy and matures with age.It occurred rapidly and is associated with the two differentattentional components(i.e.,the early orienting and the later disengagement).Both the separate and integralneural processing of facial expressions and gaze directions,involving the brain regions of the amygdala and theposterior superior temporal sulcus,were implicated in this modulation.Apart from facial expressions,other typesof social information contained in faces(e.g.,trustworthiness,familiarity,facial dominance,social status,andgroups)could also modulate the gaze-triggered orienting,which potentially engages the frontal eye field and thefrontoparietal attention network.A systematic review of the behavioral evidence of the modulation and its neuralmechanisms has significant theoretical and clinical implications.On the one hand,it will deepen ourunderstandings of the relationship between face processing and gaze-triggered orienting.On the other hand,itmay also contribute to the diagnosis and intervention of social cognitive disorders