Social cues, such as eye gaze and head-turns, can orient attention automatically. Social cue processing includes three sequential stages, namely cue selection, cue following and object recognition. In a typical social cueing task, a central face is presented and then attention is directed to potential target location by an eye gaze or head turn. In these paradigms, the standard finding is that despite the non-predictive nature of the cue (i.e., the target is as likely to appear at the validly cued location as the invalidly cued location), targets appearing at the validly cued location are detected and identified faster than targets presented at the invalidly cued location. The cueing effect starts to emerge at short cue-target stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) (e.g., 105 ms) and diminishes at the long SOA (e.g., 1005 ms). However, because only one object was presented on one side of the center gaze cue in these paradigms, the social cueing effect could be interfered or abolished by the peripheral onset effect (i.e., the automatic orienting of attention by the abrupt appearance of a single object event). The goal of this dissertation was to develop a modified social cueing task to measure the temporal dynamics of social cue processing while eliminating the potential confounds from the peripheral onset effect. In the Cued Recognition Task, the peripheral onset effect is removed by simultaneously presenting a target and a distractor object following a non-predictive head-turn cue. Results from a series of experiments using the Cued Recognition Task showed that: (a) if the distractor was not presented on the opposite side of the target, the peripheral onset effect elicited by the target onset interfered with the social cueing effect elicited by the head-turn; (b) in the cued recognition paradigm, the reflexive attention orientation effect elicited by social cues could be inhibited at 0 ms of SOA, started to emerge at 105 ms of SOA, became stable at 300 and 600 ms of SOA and sustained at 1005 ms of SOA; (c) children with ASD showed equivalent magnitude of social cueing effect as TD controls, but they were slower across all conditions despite the fact that they were as fast as TD controls in object recognition. The Cued Recognition Model developed based on all the findings in this dissertation was described in order to provide an explicit explanation of how social cues influence everyday object recognition. / Graduate / 0633 / 0620 / 0623 / xubuyun@uvic.ca

It can be observed that the anti-normative behaviors occur more frequently in Computer-Mediated-Communication than in face-to-face communication. Internet often let people feel less restraint to use rude or threatening language, leashing harsh criticisms, venting anger or hatred. Thus, the issues surrounding ¡§Toxic Disinhibition¡¨ have attracted more and more concern from society and academia. Our empirical study tries to get the whole picture and proposed a more comprehensive model integrating diverse factors and involving the synthesis of different viewpoints. Accordingly, this paper proceeds to examine and integrate the two important aspects, (1) Internet attributes in which reduced social cue, social presence, controllability, and the fluidity of the identity and (2) psychological state, especially theories of deindividuation.Moreover, different from most prior researches, we consider deindividuation as an important mediating role, not just an antecedent of toxic disinhibition. An empirical survey methodology is applied to test the research model and six hypotheses are developed in this study, and then we use PLS to analyze it. Our empirical results showed that the essential mediating role of deindividuation, also confirming the highly significant with toxic disinhibition. Moreover, we identify major factors that may affect deindividuation. We find that except for reduced social cue, reduced social presence, controllability and fluidity of identity also has significant impact on deindividuation, and then cause toxic disinhibition. In sum, unlike much prior research that has focused on only a limited aspect of toxic disinhibition, we take integrated view and proposed a more comprehensive model therefore be useful to a better understanding of the nature of toxic disinhibition. And this study provides some suggestions for the online disinhibition research.