Social Cuing: A systematic review

Non-social stimuli, such as sudden onset or motion stimuli, are known to drive a set of facilitatory and inhibitory mechanisms that affect the temporal and spatial characteristics of responses to subsequent targets. The observation of goal-directed hand movements may activate similar facilitatory and inhibitory mechanisms. In contrast, the observation of social gaze cues tend to show only facilitatory effects. That is, when a central human or human-like model suddenly shifts gaze to look at one of several potential target locations, reaction times are shorter for the gazed-at location compared to the non-gazed-at location, even when the time between the initial gaze shift and the onset of the target is long enough that inhibitory effects would be expected to emerge. We performed a pre-registered systematic review of the social cueing literature to extract data on facilitation (and potential inhibition) effects. An initial search yielded 516 results, of which 143 papers were screened for inclusion. Backward and forward searches on these 143 papers yielded 5529 unique results for screening; 347 papers met the requirements for inclusion. Results indicate that facilitatory effects for a variety of social cues (gaze cues, hand cues, body cues) are persistent even at long stimulus onset asynchronies.