| Summary: | Jointly attending to a shared referent with other people is a social attention behaviour that occurs often and has many developmental and ongoing social impacts. This thesis focused on examining the online, as well as later emerging, impacts of being the gaze leader of joint attention, which has until recently been under-researched. A novel social orienting response that occurs after viewing averted gaze is reported, showing that a gaze leader will rapidly orient their attention towards a face that follows their gaze: the gaze leading effect. In developing the paradigm necessary for this illustration a number of boundary conditions were also outlined, which suggest the social context of the interaction is paramount to the observability of the gaze leading effect. For example, it appears that the gaze leading effect works in direct opposition to other social orienting phenomenon (e.g. gaze cueing), may be specific to eye-gaze stimuli, and is associated with self-reported autism-like traits. This orienting response is suggested as evidence that humans may have an attention mechanism that promotes the more elaborate social attention state of shared attention. This thesis also assessed the longer term impacts of prior joint gaze interactions, finding that gaze perception can be influenced by prior interactions with gaze leaders, but not with followers, and further there is evidence presented that suggests a gaze leader’s attention will respond differently, later, to those whom have or have not previously followed their gaze. Again, this latter finding is associated with autism-like traits. Thus, the current work opens up a number of interesting research avenues concerning how attention orienting during gaze leading may facilitate social learning and how this response may be disrupted in atypically developing populations.
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