TY - JOUR
T1 - Spatial orienting of attention simultaneously cued by automatic social and nonsocial cues
AU - Greene, Deanna J.
AU - Zaidel, Eran
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments This material is based upon work supported by, or in part by, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office under grant number W911NF-07-1-0248. Citation of trade names does not constitute an official government endorsement or approval of the use of such commercial products. The findings of this report are not to be constructed as an official Department of the Army position, unless so designated by other authorized documents. We wish to thank Kendl Sankary, Neil Pugashetti, and Nayson Fernandes for their help with testing participants. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.
PY - 2012/8
Y1 - 2012/8
N2 - The appearance of a stimulus in the periphery and the direction of another person's eye gaze have both been shown to automatically orient attention toward the stimulus and the gazed-at location, respectively. In the present experiment, we examined the effects of viewing both a peripheral stimulus and an eye gaze stimulus simultaneously in order to determine whether one is "more automatic" (i.e., faster, dominates) than the other and whether the two processes interact. Using a spatial cueing paradigm, we measured latency of localization of a target stimulus that was validly or invalidly cued by an uninformative (i.e., nonpredictive) peripheral cue, an uninformative eye gaze cue, or both simultaneously (double cue). We included a short and a long cue-target interval in order to investigate the early and late facilitatory and inhibitory effects of the two processes. Results demonstrated that when the double cues were consistent with each other (indicating the same target location), the effects, both early and late, were the same as when the peripheral cue was presented alone. When the double cues were inconsistent (indicating opposite target locations), the late effect was the same as the peripheral cue, but the early effect was intermediate between the two types of cues. Our results better support an interactive, rather than an additive relationship between social and nonsocial automatic orienting. The double cue conditions that showed similar effects to the peripheral cues suggest that the peripheral cue dominates.
AB - The appearance of a stimulus in the periphery and the direction of another person's eye gaze have both been shown to automatically orient attention toward the stimulus and the gazed-at location, respectively. In the present experiment, we examined the effects of viewing both a peripheral stimulus and an eye gaze stimulus simultaneously in order to determine whether one is "more automatic" (i.e., faster, dominates) than the other and whether the two processes interact. Using a spatial cueing paradigm, we measured latency of localization of a target stimulus that was validly or invalidly cued by an uninformative (i.e., nonpredictive) peripheral cue, an uninformative eye gaze cue, or both simultaneously (double cue). We included a short and a long cue-target interval in order to investigate the early and late facilitatory and inhibitory effects of the two processes. Results demonstrated that when the double cues were consistent with each other (indicating the same target location), the effects, both early and late, were the same as when the peripheral cue was presented alone. When the double cues were inconsistent (indicating opposite target locations), the late effect was the same as the peripheral cue, but the early effect was intermediate between the two types of cues. Our results better support an interactive, rather than an additive relationship between social and nonsocial automatic orienting. The double cue conditions that showed similar effects to the peripheral cues suggest that the peripheral cue dominates.
KW - Exogenous orienting
KW - Inhibition of return
KW - Reflexive attention
KW - Social cues
KW - Spatial attention
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84864283049&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s00221-012-3152-2
DO - 10.1007/s00221-012-3152-2
M3 - Article
C2 - 22760583
AN - SCOPUS:84864283049
VL - 221
SP - 115
EP - 122
JO - Experimental Brain Research
JF - Experimental Brain Research
SN - 0014-4819
IS - 1
ER -