Gender and perceived cooperation modulate visual attention in a joint spatial cueing task

This research investigated how interactive social contexts shape basic visual attention. It has been shown that social information can modulate inhibition of return effects in joint spatial cueing tasks. We predicted that if perceptions of cooperativeness explain this phenomenon, we would then observe larger inhibition of return effects for more cooperative individuals and in highly cooperative contexts. Experiments 1a and 1b found larger inhibition of return effects and greater perceptions of cooperativeness for female compared to male participants, consistent with the literature on gender stereotypes and the behavioural evidence that females are more cooperative than males. In Experiment 2a and 2b, we experimentally manipulated the cooperativeness of the task, describing it as either a team or an individual game. This time, we found larger inhibition of return effects and greater perceptions of cooperativeness for male participants in the team compared to the individual game. We conclude that construing interactive contexts as cooperative plays an important role in the joint spatial orienting of visual attention, and we propose this as an example of socially distributed cognition.