Is eye gaze direction always determined without intent?

Abstract

It is widely assumed that processing of gaze direction occurs "automatically," in the sense that it is reflexive (unfolds in the absence of intention). We assessed this view in a task in which participants saw a schematic face in which the eyes were gazing left or right, along with a second directional target (an arrow in Experiment 1; a directional word in Experiment 2). The eyes and other directional target were sometimes congruent and other times incongruent. On each trial, participants were cued with a tone to respond to either the direction the eyes were gazing, or the direction the noneye target indicated. The time between the onset of the task cue and the onset of the face was manipulated so that on half the trials the face and the cue were presented at the same time. Regardless of the type of target, the congruency effect was the same size at the zero SOA as it was at the 750 SOA, suggesting that eyes were not processed until participants knew what task to perform. These results are consistent with the claim that processing of gaze direction is, at least some of the time, secondary to an intent (i.e., it is not reflexive).

If not When, then Where? Ignoring Temporal Information Eliminates Reflexive but not Volitional Spatial Orienting

“…Our finding that reflexive spatial orienting to arrow cues is modulated by implicit changes in temporal attention suggests that there is an important volitional component to this effect, a conclusion which is convergent with Hayward and Ristic [43,46], as well as recent work by O’Malley and Besner [22]. In this latter investigation, the researchers concluded that central arrow or gaze cues that implicitly convey directionality still need volitional attention to be directed towards them in order to trigger a spatial cuing effect.…”

“…The present study addressed precisely this question and discovered that whereas reflexive spatial attention orienting is modulated by implicit changes in temporal attention, volitional spatial attention orienting is not. These data converge on the notion that reflexive shifts of attention are sensitive to strategic changes in attention [22] even when those attentional changes are in a non-spatial domain [43]. Moreover, they dovetail with the idea that reflexive spatial orienting to a central cue that has implicit directionality (e.g., arrows), and volitional spatial orienting that is engaged by a central predictive cue that does not possess any inherent directionality (e.g., a letter) will engage qualitatively distinct spatial attentional mechanisms [26,27].…”

“…With the turn of the century, however, researchers recognized that reflexive orienting can also be elicited by certain centrally presented symbolic cues, for example arrows or eye gaze [15,16,17,18,19,20,21], but see [22] for boundary conditions. Many have reported that reflexive orienting in response to central cues may be qualitatively different than to peripheral exogenous cues [15], such that peripheral cues will trigger orienting reflexively even in young infants [23] whereas reflexive orienting to centrally presented cues requires the development of an over-learned association between a cue and its ascribed directionality [24,25,26,27].…”

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

“…It could be objected that the unidimensional stimuli used in Block 1 fails to address the possibility that one dimension might be less discriminable in the presence of the other dimension . In response to this possibility, we note that O’Malley and Besner (2014) report an experiment whose stimuli are identical to those used here in Block 3. In their experiment the eyes and an arrow were presented on every trial, and depending on the status of an auditory cue, participants were asked to determine in which direction the relevant dimension was pointing to.…”

“…The set of four schematic faces from O’Malley and Besner (2014) were used in Block 2 ( Figure 1 ; left) and Block 3 (see Figure 1 ; left and right), along with four unidimensional schematic faces created for Block 1 ( Figure 2 ). Each face was 3.8 cm in diameter and consisted of a black outlined circle on a white background.…”