Do eyes and arrows elicit automatic orienting? Three mutually exclusive hypotheses and a test

Abstract

Eyes in a schematic face and arrows can each cue an upcoming target such that responses to a target are faster to a valid than an invalid cue. These effects are sometimes claimed to reflect “automatic” orienting. One test of an automatic process concerns the extent to which it can be interfered with by another process. The present experiment investigates the ability of eyes and arrows to cue an upcoming target when both cues are present at the same time. On some trials they are congruent (both cues signal the same direction); on other trials they are incongruent (the two cues signal opposite directions). When the cues are congruent a valid cue produced faster RTs than an invalid cue. In the incongruent case arrows are resistant to interference from eyes, whereas an incongruent arrow eliminates a cueing effect for eyes. The discussion elaborates briefly on the theoretical implications.

On the determination of eye gaze and arrow direction: Automaticity reconsidered.

“…Importantly, there is no explicit requirement for a response to eye or arrow direction in the spatial cueing paradigm. Given that the results reported by Besner et al (2021) yield the same conclusion as here, then by appeal to parsimony, at least in the case of arrows interfering with eye judgments, the observed interference is more easily understood as reflecting an effect that penetrates the module responsible for eye gaze determination itself, rather than to some form of decision level or motor preparation effect. Converging evidence for this conclusion is also seen when the distribution of RTs is considered in a later section.…”

“…That is, their novelty invites the question as to how the present results speak, if at all, to the literature in which eyes or arrows are separately used as cues at fixation for an upcoming, spatially lateralized target. Besner et al (2021) report an experiment in which a schematic face at appeared at fixation and always contained both eyes and an arrow (the displays were the same as used here). The eyes and the arrow were either congruent or incongruent with each other, appeared briefly on every trial at fixation, and were followed quickly by a lateralized target letter.…”

“…Besner et al (2021) report an experiment in which a schematic face at appeared at fixation and always contained both eyes and an arrow (the displays were the same as used here). The eyes and the arrow were either congruent or incongruent with each other, appeared briefly on every trial at fixation, and were followed quickly by a lateralized target letter.…”

Social attention as a general mechanism? Demonstrating the influence of stimulus content factors on social attentional biasing.

“…Second, and in contrast to oculomotor data from Experiment 6, other manipulations of stimulus content factors did not result in reliable social attentional biases in manual responses when participants' eye movements were controlled. This finding is consistent with recent work showing that controlling stimulus content, visual context, and task settings abolishes social attentional biasing in manual performance (Pereira et al, 2019(Pereira et al, , 2020(Pereira et al, , 2022, and adds to the growing body of literature demonstrating null or conditional social attentional biasing effects (Besner et al, 2021a(Besner et al, , 2021bBurra et al, 2018;McCrackin & Itier, 2018Ricciardelli et al, 2013;Võ et al, 2012).…”

On the joint effects of stimulus quality and word frequency in lexical decision: Conditions that promote staged versus cascaded processing.

“…4There is always the concern that the particular trim that is used when discarding subjects because of too many errors is driving the results. In response to this concern we first note that a 20% error cut-off is one we have adopted in previous research (e.g., Besner et al, 2021), and hence that is the criterion we examined first, and reported here. We investigated this issue further in a subsequent analysis where we adopted a more liberal 20% average error cut-off overall rather than in any one condition, as suggested by D. Balota (personal communication, 2021).…”