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

Abstract

It is a widely held view that the determination of eye gaze direction is "automatic" in various senses (e.g., innate; informationally encapsulated; triggered without intent). The determination of arrow direction is also held to be automatic (following a certain amount of learning) despite not being innate. The present experiments evaluate the automaticity assumption of both eyes and arrows in terms of an interference criterion. The results of 10 experiments support the inference that explicit judgements of eye gaze direction, when participants respond with a lateralized key press, are (a) neither automatic in the strong sense (they are interfered with by an uninformative, incongruent arrow in the display) and (b) nor are they are automatic in a weaker sense (uninformative, incongruent arrows interfere more strongly with the determination of eye gaze direction than uninformative, incongruent eyes interfere with the arrow direction task). However, the determination of arrow direction is also not strongly automatic, given that it is interfered with by irrelevant eyes. At least with respect to an interference criterion, the determination of eye gaze direction appears less prepotent than the determination of arrow direction, which itself is only weakly automatic. Public Significance StatementThe determination of eye gaze direction is widely seen as innate, and often described as automatic in being triggered without intent, and implied to be impervious to interference from other mental processes. Indeed, it is so widely understood in this way that it has not been subjected to any strong tests such as whether it escapes competition from countervailing cues like arrow direction (which are themselves learned later in development, are symbolic and hence need an interpretation, at least during the learning phase, and after learning are themselves also seen as "automatic"). The results of the present work suggest (a) that the most widely accepted view about the determinants of one of the most basic of mental processes grounded in biology that service both social ends and survival in our ancestral past calls for a more nuanced account and (b) that judgements about arrow direction are only weakly automatic, given that they are interfered with by irrelevant eyes.

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).…”

The computational substrates of holistic face processing in cognitive control

“…The purpose of our article is to investigate whether the holistic cognitive control mechanisms is affected by face orientation in conflict tasks. Moreover, in order to replicate previous literature in which a larger difference between incongruent and congruent condition is found in gaze than arrow judgment (Besner, et al, 2021), we investigate the general conflict effect for a variant of the Stroop task with determining the direction of arrow or eye gaze. This novel variant of the Stroop paradigm, named the arrow-gaze Stroop task, consists of an arrow judgment task and a gaze judgment task, and is used to collect behavioral data from participants.…”

“…Consequently, this spatial Stroop task reveals the unique nature of eye gaze as a special social attention stimulus. However, in a recent study (Besner, McLean, & Young, 2021), to evaluate the automaticity assumption of both eye gaze and arrows, participants are also required to judge the direction of gaze/arrows while ignoring the corresponding direction of arrows/gaze but not its location. Besner et al have found that arrow direction judgment is more automatic than that of gaze direction with reference to the interference criterion, but is itself only weakly automatic due to the interference of irrelevant gaze.…”

Testing the effects of gaze distractors with invariant spatial direction on attention cueing

“…Such an approach, however, has the unavoidable side effect of making eye gaze salient, which in turn may, by itself, paradoxically set the status of eye gaze to “task-relevant” and hence hamper any interpretation of gaze cueing as reflecting strong automatic processing. Whereas these studies implicitly encouraged participants to process eye gaze, other research explicitly required participants to provide responses as a function of eye gaze direction, leading to mixed evidence (e.g., Besner et al, 2021; Cañadas & Lupiáñez, 2012; Marotta et al, 2018). Here, we used a different avenue to test resistance to suppression, based on the manipulation of the directional (in)variability of the gaze stimulus.…”