Eye gaze cannot be ignored (but neither can arrows)

Abstract

Recent studies have tried to shed light on the automaticity of attentional shifts triggered by gaze and arrows with mixed results. In the present research, we aimed at testing a strong definition of resistance to suppression for orienting of attention elicited by these two cues. In five experiments, participants were informed with 100% certainty about the future location of a target they had to react to by presentation of either a direction word at the beginning of each trial or instructions at the beginning of each block. Gaze and arrows were presented before the target as uninformative distractors irrelevant for the task. The results showed similar patterns for gaze and arrows—namely, an interference effect when the distractors were incongruent with the upcoming target location. This suggests that the orienting of attention mediated by gaze and arrows can be considered as strongly automatic.

Keywords:

• Attention
• Automaticity
• Gaze
• Arrows
• Spatial cueing

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Steve Tipper and three anonymous reviewers for the many helpful suggestions on a previous version of the paper.

Notes

¹ One possibility to account for this spatial bias is that, following the premotor theory of attention (e.g., Rizzolatti, Riggio, Dascola, & Umiltà, 1987), while participants perceive the word cue and shift attention accordingly, saccadic eye movements to the attended location are inhibited. This inhibition of saccades towards the attended location may result in the oculomotor system being vulnerable to other cues (such as the arrow distractor) activating responses to the unattended location.

² Although not strictly relevant to our hypotheses, in order to further test possible differences between the effects exerted by gaze and arrow distractors, for all studies we performed additional analyses on RTs including the between-participants factor of gender (the number of female and male participants was roughly balanced in our experiments). Bayliss, di Pellegrino, and Tipper (2005) have provided evidence suggesting that, compared to female participants, males show a reduced cueing effect for both gaze and arrows. According to the authors, this pattern may reflect sex differences in responding to communicative signals. In brief, the only significant interaction involving gender as factor was observed in Experiment 1a: Gender × Congruency, F(1, 26) = 5.957, p < .02. The t tests indicated that female participants were faster in detecting congruent targets (M = 420 ms, SE = 25) than incongruent targets (M = 431 ms, SE = 25), t(13) = 3.864, p = .002. In contrast, RTs for congruent targets (M = 364 ms, SE = 13) and incongruent targets (M = 366 ms, SE = 14) were not statistically different for male participants, t(13) = 0.438. This pattern is partially consistent with that reported by Bayliss et al. (2005), because a difference in attention shifting between female and male participants was clearly visible at least for gaze distractors in Experiment 1a. However, it should be noted that the lack of other gender differences in the present experiments may simply reflect a lack of power, in that Bayliss et al. (2005) tested much larger samples.