Gaze as a unique attentional stimulus

Gaze elicits social and nonsocial attentional orienting: An interplay of shared and unique conflict processing mechanisms.

“…Given the novelty of the research question and the unexpected results, we planned Experiment 2 with the main aim of replicating and confirming the previous results in the context of the following preregistered hypotheses (Hemmerich et al, 2018; osf.io/r975q) expecting to find: (a) standard congruency effects for nonsocial (arrow) trials; (b) reversed congruency effects for social (gaze) trials; (c) standard CSE for nonsocial (arrow) trials; (d) reversed CSE for social (gaze) trials; and (e) replication of these stimulus-specific CSE for cross-conflict trials. This latter result would support the interpretation that social directional stimuli share a common source of spatial interference with nonsocial directional stimuli, producing CSE between them, whereas an added social feature, counteracting the spatial interference, would be ultimately responsible for the overall reversed congruency effect observed for gaze trials.…”

“…In Experiment 1, we aimed to replicate the findings of Marotta et al (2018) in the context of a within-block randomized design and to further explore sequential effects. We proposed the following preregistered hypotheses (Hemmerich et al, 2018; osf.io/fw8dn): (a) we expected to replicate the standard congruency effects observed for arrow stimuli randomly manipulated within the same block of trials, with arrows eliciting faster RTs when their direction is congruent with their spatial position; (b) we expected to find reversed congruency effects for gaze trials, with gaze producing faster RTs when its position is opposite to its gazing direction; (c) we expected to observe CSE for both gaze and arrows after repetitions of the same target type (i.e., gaze-gaze or arrow-arrow); and (d) in absence of specific predictions for cross-conflict trials (e.g., arrow-gaze), we expected that the resulting data could provide critical information both about the nature of sequential effects and the mechanisms involved in each of these conflict conditions.…”