Recent studies (Driver et al., 1999;Friesen & Kingstone, 1998;Langton & Bruce, 1999) have argued that the perception of eye gaze may be unique, as compared with other symbolic cues (e.g., arrows), in being able to automatically trigger attentional orienting. In Experiment 1, 17 participants took part in a visuospatial orienting task to investigate whether arrow cues might also trigger automatic orienting. Two arrow cues were presented for 75 msec to the left and right of a fixation asterisk. After an interval of either 25 or 225 msec, the letter O or X appeared. After both time intervals, mean response times were reliably faster when the arrows pointed toward, rather than away from, the location of the target letter. This occurred despite the fact that the participants were informed that the arrows did not predict where the target would appear. In Experiment 2, the same pattern of data was recorded when several adjustments had been made in an attempt to rule out alternative explanations for the cuing effects. Overall, the findings suggest that the eye gaze is not unique in automatically triggering orienting.

This study examines whether fearful and happy expressions enhance orienting to eye gaze, and the contribution of individual differences in trait fearfulness. Participants carried out a spatial orienting task in which they were presented with neutral, happy, and fearful expressions with eyes gazing either toward or away from a target letter (T or L). The expressions appeared either 300 ms or 700 ms before the onset of the target letter. After both time intervals there was a gaze congruency effect: Response times were faster when the eyes gazed toward (congruent condition) rather than away (incongruent condition) from the location of the target. The congruency effect was larger for fearful faces compared to neutral faces, but not happy faces compared to neutral faces. Furthermore, at a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between cue and target, the magnitude of the effect of fear on orienting increased with trait fearfulness. The results are discussed in relationship to findings of attentional bias for threat-related stimuli.Do humans respond automatically to specific signals from the face? Such an idea makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Throughout human evolutionary history, automatically shifting attention in response to another person's eye gaze may have facilitated the detection of a predator and thus conferred a survival advantage. Indeed, recent research has shown that eye gaze can trigger orienting in automatic fashion. Individuals shift their attention to the location of a target in a fast and efficient manner, when eye gaze direction is uninformative and even counterpredictive of a target location (Driver et al.

In this study I used a temporal bisection task to test if greater overestimation of time due to negative emotion is moderated by individual differences in negative emotionality. The effects of fearful facial expressions on time perception were also examined. After a training phase, participants estimated the duration of facial expressions (anger, happiness, fearfulness) and a neutral-baseline facial expression. In accordance to the operation of an arousal-based process, the duration of angry expressions was consistently overestimated relative to other expressions and the baseline condition. In support of a role for individual differences in negative emotionality on time perception, temporal bias due to angry and fearful expressions was positively correlated to individual differences in self-reported negative emotionality. The results are discussed in relation both to the literature on attentional bias to facial expressions in anxiety and fearfulness and also, to the hypothesis that angry expressions evoke a fear-specific response.

Seven experiments investigated the finding that threatening schematic faces are detected more quickly than nonthreatening faces. Threatening faces with v-shaped eyebrows (angry and scheming expressions) were detected more quickly than nonthreatening faces with inverted v-shaped eyebrows (happy and sad expressions). In contrast to the hypothesis that these effects were due to perceptual features unrelated to the face, no advantage was found for v-shaped eyebrows presented in a nonfacelike object. Furthermore, the addition of internal facial features (the eyes, or the nose and mouth) was necessary to produce the detection advantage for faces with v-shaped eyebrows. Overall, the results are interpreted as showing that the v-shaped eyebrow configuration affords easy detection, but only when other internal facial features are present.

In separate experiments, counterpredictive arrow, eye gaze, or abrupt-onset cues were used to test the hypothesis that individual differences in voluntary control influence involuntary orienting. In contrast with previous findings (Frie sen, Ristic, & Kingstone, 2004), involuntary orienting effects were found for arrow cues. Furthermore, for both eye gaze and arrow cues, individual differences in voluntary control were associated with involuntary orienting: Involuntary orienting effects were larger for participants who were more effective at using the cue to reorient attention, and also for participants who reported greater ability to control attention. Orienting to abrupt-onset cues was not correlated to individual differences in self-reported attentional control. The findings show that eye gaze and arrow cues instigate similar involuntary and voluntary effects and that involuntary orienting to symbolic cues is linked to individual differences in voluntary control.