Our attention shapes our reality. It controls the information that we focus on, the details we notice, influencing how we understand and experience the world around us. But here is the interesting part: it works both ways! Our reality, including our environments and the people within them, can also shape our attention.

Our world is full of information, far more than our brains can handle at once. Just think, every time we open our eyes, it is like being hit with a huge mix of colours, shapes, and things moving around. This is where visual attention comes in. Like a spotlight, it helps us focus on specific areas within what we see. This spotlight helps us make sense of the world by picking out what matters the most to us at any given moment. So, where we focus our attention and how long for greatly impacts the beliefs we form about the world and how we interact with it.

Interestingly, people have a natural tendency to avoid looking back at places they’ve recently seen. It is as if our attention is encouraging us to explore new locations, making it more likely that we find new information. Think of it like searching for your keys: you’re much more likely to find them if you keep exploring new locations rather than repeatedly checking the same spot! Psychologists have called this tendency inhibition of return (IOR). It is thought to have evolved to help our ancestors find food and spot dangers in new and unfamiliar environments, increasing their chances of survival.

If IOR evolved to help us adapt to our environment, would it not make sense for it to be influenced by key features of the environment it is adapting to? Well, this is exactly what research has found! As humans, we spend the majority of our lives surrounded by other people. Recent studies have shown that even the presence of another person can affect the speed that we redirect our attention to places we have already looked.

It does not stop there. Widespread social factors, like social inequality, can further shape our attention (Pyper, 2023). That is when some people have more access to vital resources like jobs, education, and healthcare, while others have less. Under conditions of high inequality people are quicker to return their gaze to a location that have previously looked at (a smaller IOR effect) than in contexts of low inequality. So, it appears inequality is not just about what we have, and what we lack; it extends to the subtle ways it affects our daily experiences, like what information we take notice of.

What did we do?

We set out to take a closer look at how social inequality affects visual attention by altering participants’ opportunities to improve or worsen their position in society.

To do this, we asked participants to imagine that they were starting a new life in a made-up society. In this society there was a large gap between the yearly earnings of the richest and poorest people (a high level of inequality). All participants were placed in the middle-income bracket, but they were split into three groups: one that would likely increase their position in society, another that would likely decrease it, and a third that was unlikely to change their position.

Following this, participants joined what seemed like an online meeting where they could see themselves on screen next to someone waving (a pre-recorded video). To make the scenario feel more real, they were then asked to buy important items like a house and car.

Participants then completed a common task used to study visual attention, a ‘joint spatial cuing paradigm’. As follows, participants:

1. Viewed a grid of images.
2. Were directed to where their partner was supposedly looking by a red dot.
3. Their attention is directed back to the centre by a yellow star.
4. A target appears either:
   1. where the cue was (cued trial)
   2. or in a different location (uncued trial)

To estimate the impact on participants’ attention, we calculated the IOR by comparing reaction times in uncued trials to cued trials.

Consistent with previous studies, we found that under conditions of high inequality participants displayed a smaller IOR effect than what would typically be expected. People were quicker to look back at places they have just seen. Now, here are two important things to remember:

• Under conditions of low inequality, we usually see a bigger difference in how quickly people look back.
• Participants were told that the red dot (visual cue) represented where their partner was looking.

So, what does all this mean?

Well, it seems that when resources are spread out unevenly (i.e. high inequality), people feel they need to keep a closer eye on what they have, causing them to quickly glance back at things they have already inspected. If IOR encourages the discovery of new information, then high levels of inequality discourage it!

The results regarding mobility, however, were less clear and they didn’t show a clear pattern that we can be confident about. It could be that we have reached the limit of IOR, and some social factors are just to sublet to impact attention. Or maybe the way we designed the experiment was not quite right. But one thing is clear, this line of research is starting to uncover exciting new evidence suggesting that our social surroundings could really influence how we pay attention. Psychologists need to continue to explore how everyday aspects of our social environments impact our visual attention, helping us understand why this happens.

References:

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