Social Cueing in Human Attention within the Context of Orientation Tasks

Social cues are of general importance in human attention. Even when presented with task-oriented stimuli, social cues are preferred. In orientation tasks, the degree of the impact of social cues on the perception of signal cues is of high relevance for the behavior, such as in evacuation tasks. Therefore, we investigated the degree of this impact, using free-viewing and orientation task driven stimuli. To investigate the shift of attention in further detail, single persons and groups of persons were set into conflict with signage cues. In the experimental eye tracking study, images of an evacuation guidance system were displayed with appearance of guidance-related signs as well as with appearances of persons. To test the influence of group size, the number of depicted persons was varied. The scenes were observed, alternatively, (i) under free-viewing conditions and (ii) in an orientation task. From the results of the study we conclude that in orientation tasks there is a shift of attention from social to signage cues, while larger group sizes support the attention shift towards social cues.