Object-Based Attention on Social Units: Visual Selection of Hands Performing a Social Interaction

Abstract

Traditionally, objects of attention are characterized either as full-fledged entities or either as elements grouped by Gestalt principles. Because humans appear to use social groups as units to explain social activities, we proposed that a socially defined group, according to social interaction information, would also be a possible object of attentional selection. This hypothesis was examined using displays with and without handshaking interactions. Results demonstrated that object-based attention, which was measured by an object-specific attentional advantage (i.e., shorter response times to targets on a single object), was extended to two hands performing a handshake but not to hands that did not perform meaningful social interactions, even when they did perform handshake-like actions. This finding cannot be attributed to the familiarity of the frequent co-occurrence of two handshaking hands. Hence, object-based attention can select a grouped object whose parts are connected within a meaningful social interaction. This finding implies that object-based attention is constrained by top-down information.

Keywords

selective attention object social interaction handshake open data open materials

The world contains an overwhelming amount of competing visual messages that are available to our minds, but we have a limited capacity to process all this information at the same time (Lavie, 2005). Given this limitation, visual perception is necessarily selective, and our attention indeed selects only some information for further processing to prevent the visual system from becoming overloaded (Posner & Petersen, 1990; Treisman, 1969). Most recent studies have claimed that attentional selection is guided by the structure of the information and is constrained within the boundaries of an object (i.e., object-based attention; Egly, Driver, & Rafal, 1994; Moore, Yantis, & Vaughan, 1998; Norman, Heywood, & Kentridge, 2013; O’Craven, Downing, & Kanwisher, 1999; Scholl, 2001), which complements (or perhaps contrasts with) the traditional view that attention acts like a spotlight or zoom lens being deployed to locations in space regardless of the actual structure of the attended information (Cave & Bichot, 1999; Posner, Nissen, & Ogden, 1978). Although object-based-attention effects have been found many times, the fundamental question concerning the nature of the objects that constrain the allocation of this selective attention has rarely been answered (Marino & Scholl, 2005; Zemel, Behrmann, Mozer, & Bavelier, 2002).

The typical class of objects selected by attention are full-fledged and perceptually distinct entities, in which unambiguous borders separate the boundaries of the object (Egly et al., 1994; Moore et al., 1998). Particularly clear evidence supporting this claim has been reported by Egly et al. (1994). In their experiment, participants had to respond rapidly when detecting a small square appearing in any of the four ends of two distinct rectangles or objects (Fig. 1a). Before the target’s appearance, an exogenous cue appeared at one end of one of the rectangles. If the cue was invalid and targets appeared at the other end of the cued rectangle (i.e., same-object invalid trials), responses were faster than when targets appeared in the uncued rectangle (i.e., different-object invalid trials), although they were the same distance from targets as in the invalid same-object trials. This object-specific attentional advantage was claimed to support the idea that discrete visual objects constrain object-based attention. However, an object is rarely well-formed under natural viewing conditions, and its image is often spatially fragmented. Most recent studies have demonstrated that generic grouping principles, such as continuation (Moore et al., 1998), similarity (Kramer & Jacobson, 1991), or common fate (Behrmann, Zemel, & Mozer, 2000), and even boundary closure (Marino & Scholl, 2005), are sufficient to define an object of visual selection in a display. For instance, as shown in Figure 1b, Moore and colleagues (1998) reported that an object-specific attentional advantage also occurred for objects defined by subjective contours. Further evidence indicated that the perceptual experience of the conditional dependence of particular parts determines that these parts are also integrated as an object of attention (Zemel et al., 2002).

Fig. 1.

The stimuli used in the two-rectangle displays by (a) Egly, Driver, and Rafal (1994) and (b) Moore, Yantis, and Vaughan (1998) to investigate object-based attention. In each display, “C” indicates a possible cued position, “S” indicates the corresponding position of a subsequent target on a same-object invalid trial, and “D” indicates the corresponding position of a subsequent target on a different-object invalid trial.

In all the experiments cited so far, the objects operated on by selective attention were characterized by low-level grouping cues. Even though object-based attention is driven by experience, the information that characterized the attentional objects involved a formalized low-level co-occurrence between physical details. It is suggested that these objects are selected in the visual hierarchy (Feldman, 2003; Xu & Chun, 2007). However, the visual system must extract visual social information to construct the social meaning of the world (Adams, Ambady, Nakayama, & Shimojo, 2011), and generally, processing of social information is not instantiated in the visual hierarchy (Allison, Puce, & McCarthy, 2000). Whether social information as a potential top-down component defines an object boundary to constrain object-based attention remains unclear. This can be examined by uncovering which social grouping cues contribute to the object of attention, instead of other possible traditional ones. The answer to this will expand the boundary conditions of traditional kinds of object-based attention and help us understand how top-down social information flexibly modulates the selective object.

Humans have folk concepts of social groups that mark allegiances and obligations; for instance, sports teams. Indeed, research has documented that groups are more than aggregate collections of individuals; individuals who are perceived as mutual influences with an interactive intention (i.e., with an appropriate social interaction) are treated and represented as a unified group, or a creative synthesis of these individuals (Malle, 2004; Morewedge, Chandler, Smith, Schwarz, & Schooler, 2013; Noyes & Dunham, 2017; Stahl & Feigenson, 2014). Further, researchers proposed that social groups formed by meaningful interactive interrelations can be regarded as material particulars alongside individual persons and artifacts and that they are thereby counted as objects in the social world, guiding our explanations and descriptions (Sheehy, 2012). Hence, it is reasonable to assume that a group that is socially defined by social interaction information would be a possible object of attentional selection.

This hypothesis accords with the findings of two recent studies (Shen, Yin, Ding, Shui, & Zhou, 2016; Yin et al., 2013). These studies used a cuing task with one hand or agent cued and tested whether attention spread automatically to the remaining one. They found that attention was deployed to two hands performing a handshake and to agents with a coordinated interaction.¹ However, these two studies had methodological shortcomings. First, not enough competing irrelevant information was included; second, the object-advantage-attention effect was obtained by subtracting the cue effect in a purely handshaking background from the cue effect in other control conditions, instead of subtracting the cue effect within object boundaries from the cue effect without object boundaries in the same background. Hence, the different backgrounds could spread attention to two interactive hands or agents in general, which may not recruit specifically attentional selection per se. In addition, the experience of physically conditional dependence between the two handshaking hands could explain Shen and colleagues’ results regarding the attention distributed to the two hands. Hence, in the current study, we used a paradigm similar to that of Moore et al. (1998), which was uniquely created to explore object-based attention but presented handshaking hands that were socially interacting as possible selective objects (Fig. 2), to investigate whether attention also operates on objects constrained by social interaction information.

Fig. 2.

Depiction of (a) the two hands-display conditions and (b) an example trial sequence from Experiments 1 and 2. At the end of each trial, the target appeared at one of four possible positions. On valid trials, the target appeared on the same hand on which the cue had appeared. On the three invalid trial types, the target appeared on one of the three hands on which the cue had not appeared. ISI = interstimulus interval.

Experiment 1: Dynamic Handshaking Interaction

This experiment addressed whether object-specific effects of attention would be observed for objects that are created by grouping hands into a whole according to social interaction information. The social interaction information was manipulated by contrasting two hands approaching each other for handshaking with two hands performing the approaching action but with one hand upside down. While the latter condition retained the same physical structure as the handshaking condition and can be viewed as clasping one’s own two hands in a shakable gesture, it is rarely deemed to be an appropriate social interaction in daily life. If our hypothesis was right, we expected to observe an object-specific attentional advantage for the two hands in only the handshaking interaction.

Method

Participants

Twenty students (12 males, 8 females) between 18 and 24 years old (20 years on average) were paid about $2 to participate in this experiment. No participants were excluded on the basis of criteria that response accuracy should be more than 60%. The sample size was determined by (a) referring to previous research to obtain a medium effect size ( f² = ~0.2 in Experiment 1 of the study of Shen et al., 2016) and (b) a power analysis, in which, by setting the alpha level at .01, the suggested sample size was approximately 20 individuals to reach a medium effect size ( f² = 0.15, according to Cohen, 1988) given our experimental design. The sample sizes of the two experiments were determined using the same rule. All participants were right-handed, had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and were naive about the purpose of the experiment. All participants received information sheets about the experimental procedure and signed informed consent after learning the purpose and procedure of the experiment. The experimental protocol was approved by the institutional review board at the Department of Psychology, Ningbo University.

Apparatus and stimuli

Participants sat about 60 cm away from a screen in a dimly lit and sound-attenuated room. All stimuli were displayed on a gray background on a 19-in. CRT monitor (resolution = 1,204 × 768 pixels; refresh rate = 100 Hz) using Presentation software (Neurobehavioral Systems, Berkeley, CA). All data and materials have been made publicly available via the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/zf4tj/.

The stimuli included two pairs of hands, each with one hand showing its palm and the other hand showing its back. Each hand image subtended 6.6° × 4.0° (Fig. 2a; also see Videos S1 and S2 in the Supplemental Material for the presenting hands’ approaching motion). One pair of hands was placed in the upper part of the screen with a horizontal alignment, and they were separated by 4.0° when the fingertip distance was measured between the two hands; the other pair was presented with the same settings but was placed in the lower part of the screen. The vertical distance between the edges of the two hands was equal to the horizontal fingertip distance. Note that the width of a hand is greater than its height, and we manipulated the hand-to-hand distance using the edge of each hand. In this case, if one hand were selected, the attentional boundary between the hands in the horizontal alignment would be equidistant from that in the vertical alignment.

A light gray fixation cross (1° × 1°) appeared at the center of an imaginary rectangle created by the juxtaposition of the four hand images. The two pairs of hands completed the same approaching action to manipulate the social interaction intention; thereby, in the vertical alignment, the two hands with the same forms (either palm side or back side) exhibited the classical grouping cues of common fate and similarity, and in the horizontal alignment, the two different hands showed a possible social interaction according to the different settings of the hands. For half of the trials, a pair of hands was created by taking pictures when two persons performed a handshake, and the approaching action resulted in a handshaking interaction (i.e., the handshake condition). For the other half of the trials, the pair of hands was presented as in the handshake condition, except that one of the hands was upside down (i.e., the reversed-hand condition). Such an action can be implemented by an individual shaking his or her own left hand with his or her own right hand (note that the presented hands in the reversed-hand condition were rotated clockwise 15° to make the overlapping region the same as in the handshake condition during approaching). This condition disrupts the social interaction information of handshaking and was used to rule out possible explanations related to physical factors.

This manipulation was validated in our pilot investigation, in which 20 adults who were not participating in the current two experiments were recruited to evaluate “at what level do you think that the two presented hands are socially interacting?” when watching two hands approaching each other. This question was rated from 0 (without interacting) to 100 (strongly interacting). It was found that the level of perceived social interaction in the handshake condition (M = 79) was greater than that in the reversed-hand condition (M = 41), t(19) = 7.47, p < .001, d = 1.67, 95% confidence interval (CI) for the mean difference = [27.5, 48.9].

In addition to the displays of the hands, four characters were presented in each trial—three “T”/”L” hybrid characters as distractors and one “T” or “L” as a target—with one character centered on the middle of each of the four hands. These were identical to those used by Moore et al. (1998). These stimuli were blue, each subtended 0.75° × 0.75°, and each was randomly oriented at one of four orientations (0°, 90°, 180°, and 270°). Finally, the cue consisted of a white square (1° × 1°) that randomly appeared in the center of one of the four hands.

Procedure and design

Each trial started with the presentation of the fixation cross and the two pairs of hands with or without meaningful social interaction, depending on the display condition (see Fig. 2b). After remaining stationary for 100 ms, the hands began to approach each other horizontally with a constant speed of 6°/s until the images overlapped by 1° within 500 ms, to simulate handshaking. Following this display, the hands immediately reappeared at their initial locations. After an interval of 100 ms, the cue flashed at the center of one hand for 100 ms, and an interstimulus interval of 150 ms to 250 ms followed. Finally, three distractors and one target were presented, each at the center of one of the four hands. These remained on the screen for 2 s or until a response was made. Participants were asked to report whether the target was a “T” or an “L” as quickly as possible by pressing the right or left button on a standard keyboard. The next trial was initiated after a 1.5 s to 2.5 s intertrial interval.

Participants completed 400 trials in total, which fell into a 2 (display type: handshake vs. reversed-hand) × 4 (validity: valid vs. invalid horizontal hand vs. invalid vertical hand vs. invalid diagonal hand) within-subjects design. Validity was defined by the relationship between the location of the cue and the location of the target. Specifically, in valid trials, the target and the cue appeared on the same hand. In invalid horizontal-hand trials, the target appeared on the uncued hand that was horizontally opposite the cued hand; in invalid vertical-hand trials, the target appeared on the uncued hand that was vertically opposite the cued hand; and in invalid diagonal-hand trials, the target appeared on the uncued hand that was diagonally opposite the cued hand. For each display type, there were 200 trials, of which 70% were valid trials, 10% were invalid horizontal-hand trials, 10% were invalid vertical-hand trials, and the remaining 10% were invalid diagonal-hand trials. The diagonal-hand condition was adopted for catch trials to balance the uncued positions and was irrelevant to the current research question, although it provided an index to check the validity of the paradigm employed in the new stimuli with hands (i.e., response time should be longest for this condition, which was consistent with our observations). Hence, data from this condition were not analyzed but are reported in Tables S1 to S5 in the Supplemental Material available online. Note that the results of the handshake condition in both experiments could be replicated when this condition was tested in isolation (see Experiments S1a and S1b in the Supplemental Material for more details).

Further, the same results as in Experiment 1 were still found when the normal handshake condition was paired with the upside-down handshake condition (i.e., they had the same overlapping region, but the latter became ambiguous and uncommon, disturbing the processing of social meaning behind them; the reason why we did not report this experiment in the main text is that participants perceived the upside-down handshake as odd but thought the reversed-hand normal because it can be viewed as clasping one’s own two hands; see Experiment S2 in the Supplemental Material for more details). Furthermore, when the handshaking was presented vertically (though it was strange), our findings were partially replicated, in that the cue effect was smaller when the vertical hands formed a handshaking display than when they formed a reversed-hand display, but such an effect was not observed when the two hands aligned horizontally. To some extent, an object-specific attentional advantage was shown for the vertical handshaking hands; otherwise, the cue effect of the vertical alignment in the handshake condition would have been equal to (or even larger than) that in the reversed-hand condition. Hence, the conclusion that attention operates on the object of the grouped hands by a social interaction can be extended to the vertical alignment as well.

Results

The mean response times (RTs) for the correct responses are shown in Figure 3a (see also Table S1). The RT data were submitted to a 2 (display type: handshake vs. reversed hand) × 3 (validity: valid vs. invalid horizontal hand vs. invalid vertical hand) repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA). It revealed that the main effect of validity, F(2, 38) = 152.79, p < .001, η_p² = .89, and the interaction between the two factors, F(2, 38) = 15.65, p < .001, η_p² = .45, were both significant, but the main effect of display type did not reach significance, F(1, 19) = 1.72, p = .206, η_p² = .08.

Fig. 3.

Mean response time (RT) for correct responses in (a) Experiment 1 and (b) Experiment 2 as a function of display type and validity. Error bars indicate standard errors of the mean.

Post hoc tests with Bonferroni correction confirmed that RTs in valid trials were faster than those in both invalid horizontal-hand trials, p < .001, 95% CI = [−261, −161], and invalid vertical-hand trials, p < .001, 95% CI = [−285, −207], which reflects facilitation induced by the attention cue. In addition, responses in the invalid horizontal-hand trials were faster than in the invalid vertical-hand trials, p = .012, 95% CI = [−63, −7]. To analyze the interaction effect, we calculated the cue effect by subtracting the mean RT in the valid trials from that in each type of invalid trial for both display types. In the handshake condition, it was found that the cue effect when the two hands were aligned horizontally (i.e., with handshaking; (i.e., with handshaking; M = 191 ms) was smaller than when the two hands were aligned vertically (i.e., without handshaking; M = 257 ms), t(19) = 4.51, p < .001, d = 1.01, 95% CI = [−97, −35], and no significant difference was observed in the reversed-hand condition (horizontal alignment: M = 231 ms; vertical alignment: M = 235 ms), t(19) = 0.30, p = .764, d = 0.07, 95% CI = [−26, 19]. Thus, an object-specific attentional advantage was shown for the handshaking hands.

These findings indicate that two hands approaching to perform an interactive handshake are treated as an attentional object. Furthermore, for the reversed-hand condition with or without a weak social interaction, the cue effects for both the horizontal and vertical hands were greater than for the horizontal hand in the handshake condition, t(19) = 4.47, p < .001, d = 1.00, 95% CI = [22, 59]; t(19) = 3.72, p = .001, d = 0.83, 95% CI = [19, 68], respectively, and were smaller than for the vertical hand in the handshake condition, t(19) = 2.03, p = .056, d = 0.46, 95% CI = [−53, 1]; t(19) = 2.29, p = .034, d = 0.51, 95% CI = [−43, −2], respectively. This finding further indicates that attention operates on the object of the grouped hands, accordingly leading to faster detection of the target that appeared on the grouped hands by appropriate social interaction. In addition, because the attentional resource was diluted, participants required more time to reallocate attention to focus on the target that appeared on the unselected hand in the vertical alignment.

All of the same analyses were conducted with the accuracy data. None of the effects reached significance—main effect of display type: F(1, 19) = 0.39, p = .541, η_p² = .02; main effect of validity: F(2, 38) = 2.16, p = .146, η_p² = .10; interaction effect: F(2, 38) = 3.00, p = .076, η_p² = .14. Thus, the RT results cannot be attributed to the trade-off between response speed and response accuracy.

Experiment 2: Still Handshaking Gesture

Experiment 1 revealed that an object-specific attentional advantage can be observed within objects that involve the grouping of socially interactive parts. However, this finding could be explained by the experience of familiarity instead of by the perceived social interaction creating the object of attention because the grouped hands in the handshaking condition always appeared at the same time. To rule out this possibility in the current experiment, we presented hands that still began a handshaking gesture but did not actually shake. Given that an appropriate social interaction involves people influencing each other with a social action (Csibra, 2017; Hinde, 1976), the removal of the handshaking action could diminish and even erase the difference in social interaction impressions between the handshake and reversed-hand conditions but retain the identical conditional dependence between the hands. Hence, if socially related hands counting as an object of attention can really be attributed to social interaction information, the object-specific effects should not be extended to two hands exhibiting only a handshaking gesture.

Method

Twenty new students (10 males, 10 females) between 18 and 25 years old (21 years on average) were paid about $2 to participate in this experiment. The stimuli and the procedure were the same as those of Experiment 1, except that the hands never performed the approaching action but remained still for 700 ms, as in the fixation phase (see Fig. 2b), before the cue flashed.

Results

Figure 3b shows the mean RTs for trials with correct responses in all conditions (see also Table S2 in the Supplemental Material). To examine the cue effects for the hands without the social interaction, we conducted a 2 (display type: handshake vs. reversed hand) × 3 (validity: valid vs. invalid horizontal hand vs. invalid vertical hand) repeated measures ANOVA with the RT data. It yielded only a significant main effect of validity, F(2, 38) = 116.83, p < .001, η_p² = .86. Post hoc tests with Bonferroni correction showed that RTs in the valid trials were faster than those in both the invalid horizontal-hand trials, p < .001, 95% CI = [−257, −161], and the invalid vertical-hand trials, p < .001, 95% CI = [−264, −165], which confirms the existence of the cue effect. No significant difference was found between the invalid horizontal-hand and invalid vertical-hand trials, p = 1.000, 95% CI = [−28, 18]. The effect was not modulated by display type, as the interaction effect between the two factors was not significant, F(2, 38) = 0.52, p = .579, η_p² = .03. The main effect of display type also did not reach significance, F(1, 19) = 2.29, p = .147, η_p² = .11. Hence, the current results indicate that the object-specific advantage in Experiment 1 was not due to the experienced conditional dependency between the two handshaking hands.

All of the same analyses were conducted with the accuracy data, and they showed the same pattern of results as those of the RT data. Specifically, only the main effect of validity was significant, F(2, 38) =10.28, p < .001, η_p² = .35. Neither the main effect of display type, F(1, 19) = 3.51, p = .076, η_p² = .16, nor the interaction effect, F(2, 38) = 0.70, p = .442, η_p² = .04, reached significance; in fact, for display type, the response in the reversed-hand condition tended to be more accurate than that in the handshake condition, 95% CI = [−0.001, 0.023]. Post hoc analyses revealed that the responses on valid trials were more accurate than those on both invalid horizontal-hand trials, p = .002, 95% CI = [0.013, 0.059], and invalid vertical-hand trials, p = .021, 95% CI = [0.003, 0.036], and the difference between the two latter conditions was not significant, p = .202, 95% CI = [−0.039, 0.006]. Thus, the RT results cannot be attributed to the trade-off between response speed and response accuracy.

Discussion

The purpose of the research reported here was to examine whether two hands with an appropriate social interaction (i.e., handshaking) are integrated as an object of selective attention. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the object-based attention measured by the object-specific attentional advantage—shorter RTs to targets on a single object—is extended to two hands in a handshaking interaction but not to those without a meaningful social interaction even when implementing handshake-like actions. Experiment 2 ruled out the possibility that the extension can be attributed to familiarity with frequent combinations of two handshaking hands forming a unit. These findings indicate that attention also operates on objects characterized by a perceived social interaction.

In the current study, the horizontally aligned hands differed from the vertically aligned hands in terms of the structure of the hand images (i.e., only horizontal handshaking) and the amount of visual clutter occupying the space; thus, some researchers would argue that the observed attention effects may not be the result of social factors. However, Experiments 1 and 2 had the same structure and content differences between the horizontally and vertically aligned hands, but only the two hands in the socially interactive handshake in Experiment 1 showed the object-specific advantage of attention, which contradicts nonsocial explanations. Further, the overlapping region during approaching hands cannot explain our results either, because the region size was kept as near as possible the same between the handshake and reversed-hand conditions in Experiment 1. Even when the overlapping space was manipulated to be identical, only the handshake condition still showed object-based attention effects (Experiment S2). Hence, the social interaction information conveyed by the handshaking action is likely to contribute to object-based attention.

The current findings have important implications for what can be counted as the operational object of attention and its mechanisms. Previously, object-based attention has been found to occur with stimuli that do not have an intact closed contour but do employ low-level grouping cues (Marrara & Moore, 2003; Moore et al., 1998). The contribution of the present study to the literature is that it expands the boundary conditions of the sort of object-based attention to a seemingly high-level and social “object” in which an invisible social link connects discrete elements (i.e., hands) into a whole. Such expansion suggests that social information, at least social interaction information, which is processed mainly in the mirror neuron system and the mentalizing system (e.g., posterior superior temporal sulcus; Isik, Koldewyn, Beeler, & Kanwisher, 2017) and is different from the parietal cortex region in object-based representations, can set top-down signals to constrain object-based attention. The possible pathway of this top-down modulation may start from the frontal cortex, which is thought to send out top-down signals (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002), after being activated by social interaction information. Then it feeds into the parietal cortex to add a new level beyond the visual hierarchy formed by low-level grouping cues and affixes two distinct objects into one new object to guide attentional selection. Lastly, the feedback signals from object-representation regions pass downward to the early visual cortex to enhance activations in areas representing other locations of the same object. Such speculation is consistent with the view that feedback signals from parietal and frontal regions are the most likely source for activity modulations in the early visual cortex (Müller & Kleinschmidt, 2003). While our proposed mechanism implies that without a top-down signal from the frontal cortex, an object defined by traditional grouping cues can constrain object-based attention by default, and top-down information could join two distinct objects (hands) into the hierarchical organization of visual scene interpretations to guide attention. Hence, classic object-based attention functions differently from the current one as constrained by social interaction. However, this issue needs to be addressed in the future.

To conclude, attention does not necessarily operate only on full-fledged objects or objects characterized by generic grouping principles; it is also adapted to select a grouped object whose parts are connected within a meaningful social interaction. This finding implies that object-based attention is constrained by top-down information, at least social interaction information.

Supplemental Material

ShenOpenPracticesDisclosure – Supplemental material for Object-Based Attention on Social Units: Visual Selection of Hands Performing a Social Interaction

Supplemental material, ShenOpenPracticesDisclosure for Object-Based Attention on Social Units: Visual Selection of Hands Performing a Social Interaction by Jun Yin, Haokui Xu, Jipeng Duan and Mowei Shen in Psychological Science

Supplemental Material

ShenSupplementalExperiments – Supplemental material for Object-Based Attention on Social Units: Visual Selection of Hands Performing a Social Interaction

Supplemental material, ShenSupplementalExperiments for Object-Based Attention on Social Units: Visual Selection of Hands Performing a Social Interaction by Jun Yin, Haokui Xu, Jipeng Duan and Mowei Shen in Psychological Science

Supplemental Material

ShenSupplementalTables – Supplemental material for Object-Based Attention on Social Units: Visual Selection of Hands Performing a Social Interaction

Supplemental material, ShenSupplementalTables for Object-Based Attention on Social Units: Visual Selection of Hands Performing a Social Interaction by Jun Yin, Haokui Xu, Jipeng Duan and Mowei Shen in Psychological Science

Footnotes

Action Editor

Edward S. Awh served as action editor for this article.

Author Contributions

J. Yin and M. Shen conceived and designed the experiments. J. Yin, H. Xu, J. Duan, and M. Shen performed the experiments and analyzed the data. J. Yin, H. Xu, and M. Shen wrote the manuscript.

ORCID iD

Jun Yin

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 31600871 and 31571119).

Supplemental Material

Additional supporting information can be found at

Open Practices

All data and materials have been made publicly available via the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/zf4tj/. The design and analysis plans for these experiments were not preregistered. The complete Open Practices Disclosure for this article can be found at https://journals-sagepub-com.web.bisu.edu.cn/doi/suppl/10.1177/0956797617749636. This article has received badges for Open Data and Open Materials. More information about the Open Practices badges can be found at .

Notes

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