Unmasking social attention: The key distinction between social and non-social attention emerges in disengagement, not engagement

The debate surrounding whether social and non-social attention share the same mechanism has been contentious. While prior studies predominantly focused on engagement, we examined the potential disparity between social and non-social attention from both perspectives of engagement and disengagement, respectively. We developed a two-stage attention-shifting paradigm to capture both attention engagement and disengagement. Combining results from five eye-tracking experiments, we supported that the disengagement of social attention markedly outpaces that of non-social attention, while no significant discrepancy emerges in engagement. We uncovered that the faster disengagement of social attention came from its social nature by eliminating alternative explanations including broader fixation distribution width, reduced directional salience in the peripheral visual field, decreased cue-object categorical consistency, reduced perceived validity, and faster processing time. Our study supported that the distinction between social and non-social attention is rooted in attention disengagement, not engagement.