The influence of emotional facial expressions on gaze-following in grouped and solitary pedestrians

Abstract

The mechanisms contributing to collective attention in humans remain unclear. Research indicates that pedestrians utilise the gaze direction of others nearby to acquire environmentally relevant information, but it is not known which, if any, additional social cues influence this transmission. Extending upon previous field studies, we investigated whether gaze cues paired with emotional facial expressions (neutral, happy, suspicious and fearsome) of an oncoming walking confederate modulate gaze-following by pedestrians moving in a natural corridor. We found that pedestrians walking alone were not sensitive to this manipulation, while individuals traveling together in groups did reliably alter their response in relation to emotional cues. In particular, members of a collective were more likely to follow gaze cues indicative of a potential threat (i.e., suspicious or fearful facial expression). This modulation of visual attention dependent on whether pedestrians are in social aggregates may be important to drive adaptive exploitation of social information, and particularly emotional stimuli within natural contexts.