Social cues, such as eye gaze and pointing fingers, can increase the prioritisation of specific locations for cognitive processing. A previous study using a manual reaching task showed that, although both gaze and pointing cues altered target prioritisation (reaction times [RTs]), only pointing cues affected action execution (trajectory deviations). These differential effects of gaze and pointing cues on action execution could be because the gaze cue was conveyed through a disembodied head; hence, the model lacked the potential for a body part (i.e., hands) to interact with the target. In the present study, the image of a male gaze model, whose gaze direction coincided with two potential target locations, was centrally presented. The model either had his arms and hands extended underneath the potential target locations, indicating the potential to act on the targets (Experiment 1), or had his arms crossed in front of his chest, indicating the absence of potential to act (Experiment 2). Participants reached to a target that followed a nonpredictive gaze cue at one of three stimulus onset asynchronies. RTs and reach trajectories of the movements to cued and uncued targets were analysed. RTs showed a facilitation effect for both experiments, whereas trajectory analysis revealed facilitatory and inhibitory effects, but only in Experiment 1 when the model could potentially act on the targets. The results of this study suggested that when the gaze model had the potential to interact with the cued target location, the model's gaze affected not only target prioritisation but also movement execution.

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Smartphones deploy multiple microphones to reduce background noise, reverberation and interferences. This paper presents the regulated Frost beamformer (REF) for acoustic gain enhancement and speech recognition improvement in smartphones. Conventional and adaptive beamformers were investigated with recourse to the acoustic transducer specifications of the Samsung Galaxy S2 device. The REF algorithm outperforms the time delay and Frost beamformers by over 5 dB and 2 dB respectively. Moreover, the minimum array gain is 5 dB (REF) as opposed to the floor gain of 2 dB. Compared with the delay-and-sum and Frost beamformers, the output waveform of the REF beamformer is the closest to the desired signal.