Abstract
When we see another person look somewhere, we automatically attend to the same location in space. Thisjoint attention emerges early in life and has a great impact on social interactions in development and in everyday adult life. The direction of another’s gaze indicates what object is of current interest, which may be the target for a subsequent action. In this study, we found that objects that are looked at by other people are liked more than objects that do not receive the attention of other people (Experiment 1). This suggests that observing averted gaze can have an impact on the affective appraisals of objects in the environment. This liking effect was absent when an arrow was used to cue attention (Experiment 2). This underlines the importance of other people’s interactions with objects for generating our own impressions of such stimuli in the world.
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This work was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC-UK) grant awarded to S.P.T. and by an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship award to A.P.B.
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Bayliss, A.P., Paul, M.A., Cannon, P.R. et al. Gaze cuing and affective judgments of objects: I like what you look at. Psychon Bull Rev 13, 1061–1066 (2006). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213926
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213926