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Face Masks Do Not Alter Gaze Cueing of Attention: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic

Interacting with others wearing a face mask has become a regular worldwide practice since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the impact of face masks on cognitive mechanisms supporting social interaction is still largely unexplored. In the present work, we focused on gaze cueing of att...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Dalmaso, Mario, Zhang, Xinyuan, Galfano, Giovanni, Castelli, Luigi
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8673884/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34925752
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20416695211058480
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author Dalmaso, Mario
Zhang, Xinyuan
Galfano, Giovanni
Castelli, Luigi
author_facet Dalmaso, Mario
Zhang, Xinyuan
Galfano, Giovanni
Castelli, Luigi
author_sort Dalmaso, Mario
collection PubMed
description Interacting with others wearing a face mask has become a regular worldwide practice since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the impact of face masks on cognitive mechanisms supporting social interaction is still largely unexplored. In the present work, we focused on gaze cueing of attention, a phenomenon tapping the essential ability which allows individuals to orient their attentional resources in response to eye gaze signals coming from others. Participants from both a European (i.e., Italy; Experiment 1) and an Asian (i.e., China; Experiment 2) country were involved, namely two countries in which the daily use of face masks before COVID-19 pandemic was either extremely uncommon or frequently adopted, respectively. Both samples completed a task in which a peripheral target had to be discriminated while a task irrelevant averted gaze face, wearing a mask or not, acted as a central cueing stimulus. Overall, a reliable and comparable gaze cueing emerged in both experiments, independent of the mask condition. These findings suggest that gaze cueing of attention is preserved even when the person perceived is wearing a face mask.
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spelling pubmed-86738842021-12-16 Face Masks Do Not Alter Gaze Cueing of Attention: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic Dalmaso, Mario Zhang, Xinyuan Galfano, Giovanni Castelli, Luigi Iperception Standard Article Interacting with others wearing a face mask has become a regular worldwide practice since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the impact of face masks on cognitive mechanisms supporting social interaction is still largely unexplored. In the present work, we focused on gaze cueing of attention, a phenomenon tapping the essential ability which allows individuals to orient their attentional resources in response to eye gaze signals coming from others. Participants from both a European (i.e., Italy; Experiment 1) and an Asian (i.e., China; Experiment 2) country were involved, namely two countries in which the daily use of face masks before COVID-19 pandemic was either extremely uncommon or frequently adopted, respectively. Both samples completed a task in which a peripheral target had to be discriminated while a task irrelevant averted gaze face, wearing a mask or not, acted as a central cueing stimulus. Overall, a reliable and comparable gaze cueing emerged in both experiments, independent of the mask condition. These findings suggest that gaze cueing of attention is preserved even when the person perceived is wearing a face mask. SAGE Publications 2021-11-30 /pmc/articles/PMC8673884/ /pubmed/34925752 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20416695211058480 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Standard Article
Dalmaso, Mario
Zhang, Xinyuan
Galfano, Giovanni
Castelli, Luigi
Face Masks Do Not Alter Gaze Cueing of Attention: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic
title Face Masks Do Not Alter Gaze Cueing of Attention: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic
title_full Face Masks Do Not Alter Gaze Cueing of Attention: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic
title_fullStr Face Masks Do Not Alter Gaze Cueing of Attention: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic
title_full_unstemmed Face Masks Do Not Alter Gaze Cueing of Attention: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic
title_short Face Masks Do Not Alter Gaze Cueing of Attention: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic
title_sort face masks do not alter gaze cueing of attention: evidence from the covid-19 pandemic
topic Standard Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8673884/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34925752
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20416695211058480
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