Internal Social Attention: Gaze Cues Stored in Working Memory Trigger Involuntary Attentional Orienting
研究发现，工作记忆中存储的无关注视线索能自动引导成年人的注意定向，而被动观看或非社会线索（如箭头）则无此效应，揭示了社会注意的独特性。
Previous research has shown that social cues, including eye gaze, can readily guide our focus of attention—a phenomenon referred to as social attention. Here, we demonstrated that internally maintained social cues in working memory (WM) can produce an analogous attentional effect ( N = 57). Using the delayed-match-to-sample paradigm combined with the dot-probe task, we found that holding irrelevant gaze cues in WM can induce attentional orienting in college-age adults. Importantly, this WM-induced attention effect could not be explained simply by the perceptual-attentional process, because the identical gaze cues that were only passively viewed and not memorized in WM could not trigger attentional orienting beyond the typical time window of social attention. Furthermore, nonsocial cues (i.e., arrows) held in WM failed to elicit the attentional-orienting effect. These findings provide new evidence for the conceptualization of WM as internally directed attention and highlight the uniqueness of social attention compared with nonsocial attention.