Are eyes special? Electrophysiological and behavioural evidence for a dissociation between eye-gaze and arrows attentional mechanisms

Marotta, Andrea; Lupiáñez, Juan; Román-Caballero, Rafael; Narganes-Pineda, Cristina; Martín-Arévalo, Elisa

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.03.017

Cited by 34 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…While it cannot be ruled out that non-social incongruent stimuli (e.g., arrows) can similarly exert a cognitive conflict (Gregory & Jackson, 2017;Gregory & Jackson, 2019;Marotta et al, 2012;Marotta et al, 2018;Marotta et al, 2019), the aim of this study was to examine whether humanoid robots/artificial agents, can exert cognitive conflict through their behavior. Although it remains to be answered whether these specific findings would also be observed in physical human-robot interaction (as opposed to screen-based experiments), it is entirely plausible since previous work has shown that psychological phenomena from screen-based experiments extend to physical human-robot interaction (Kompatsiari et al, 2018;Abubshait & Wykowska, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Interestingly, eyes elicited opposite congruency effects compared to arrows (faster responses to incongruent relative to congruent cues). Analysis of the neural correlates (Marotta et al, 2019) revealed that conflicting information from eyes and arrows elicits identical brain activity in the early stages of processing. Nonetheless, social stimuli demand more cognitive resources in later stages involving cognitive control and response selection (200 ms after stimulus onset).…”

Section: Cognitive Conflict and Social Signalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Irrelevant Robot Signals in a Categorization Task Induce Cognitive Conflict in Performance, Eye Trajectories, the N2 Component of the EEG Signal, and Frontal Theta Oscillations

Perez-Osorio

Abubshait

Wykowska

2021

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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Understanding others' nonverbal behavior is essential for social interaction, as it allows, among others, to infer mental states. Although gaze communication, a well-established nonverbal social behavior, has shown its importance in inferring others' mental states, not much is known about the effects of irrelevant gaze signals on cognitive conflict markers during collaborative settings. Here, participants completed a categorization task where they categorized objects based on their color while observing images of a robot. On each trial, participants observed the robot iCub grasping an object from a table and offering it to them to simulate a handover. Once the robot “moved” the object forward, participants were asked to categorize the object according to its color. Before participants were allowed to respond, the robot made a lateral head/gaze shift. The gaze shifts were either congruent or incongruent with the object's color. We expected that incongruent head cues would induce more errors (Study 1), would be associated with more curvature in eye-tracking trajectories (Study 2), and induce larger amplitude in electrophysiological markers of cognitive conflict (Study 3). Results of the three studies show more oculomotor interference as measured in error rates (Study 1), larger curvatures eye-tracking trajectories (Study 2), and higher amplitudes of the N2 ERP of the EEG signals as well as higher event-related spectral perturbation amplitudes (Study 3) for incongruent trials compared with congruent trials. Our findings reveal that behavioral, ocular, and electrophysiological markers can index the influence of irrelevant signals during goal-oriented tasks.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Cognitive Conflict and Social Signalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Irrelevant Robot Signals in a Categorization Task Induce Cognitive Conflict in Performance, Eye Trajectories, the N2 Component of the EEG Signal, and Frontal Theta Oscillations

Perez-Osorio

Abubshait

Wykowska

2021

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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“…Using a spatial interference task, recent studies (Marotta et al, 2018(Marotta et al, , 2019 have demonstrated a clear dissociation between eye gaze and arrows, as they lead to opposite spatial interference effects: arrows elicit a standard congruency effect, while eye gaze elicits reversed interference. However, the addition in Román-Caballero et al (2021) of a geometric background to the arrow targets, in an attempt to produce a condition perceptually equivalent to whole faces, prevented the appearance of the standard spatial conflict generally observed with arrows, while a larger reversed congruency effect was observed, in comparison to cropped eyes (Marotta et al, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Instead, the larger reversion for eye gaze could be driven by faces eliciting stronger social-specific component (presumably, joint distraction) than eyes alone, as faces typically carry more socially relevant information than eyes alone. However, the fact that spatial interference similarly modulated earlier ERP components with both gaze and arrows (Marotta et al, 2019) and that the congruency sequence effect appeared independently of the preceding type of target (Hemmerich et al, 2021), points, at least in part, to a shared attentional mechanism. This is not the first time that experimental paradigms have shown evidence of common and dissociable attentional effects with eye gaze and arrows.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Target–background segregation in a spatial interference paradigm reveals shared and specific attentional mechanisms triggered by gaze and arrows.

Román-Caballero

Marotta

Lupiáñez

2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Recent research has found that eye gaze and arrows yield opposite congruency effects in a spatial interference paradigm, arrows eliciting faster responses when their direction is congruent with their position (standard congruency effect), and gaze producing faster reaction times for incongruent conditions (reversed congruency effect). In addition, we observed by serendipity in a previous study that the standard effect with arrows was reduced when the target appeared within a complex background, presumably because of hindered figure-ground segregation. Under the same conditions, the reversed effect with gaze became more negative. To explain our previous results, we proposed the coexistence of two opposite attentional effects with eye gaze: a standard spatial interference component being common to both arrows and gaze, and a larger social-specific dimension leading to the overall reversion of the effect for gaze. Both in Experiments 1 and 2, gaze or arrow targets were presented after or concurrently with an irrelevant background (asynchronous vs. synchronous conditions, respectively). Consistent with our preregistered hypotheses, the standard effect with arrows was present in the asynchronous condition (automatic figure-ground segregation) but reduced in the synchronous one (difficult figure-ground segregation). Correspondingly with the effect on arrows interference, eye gaze triggered a significant reversed effect in the synchronous condition that decreased in the asynchronous one. These results underline the importance of the figure-ground segregation processes as modulators of the spatial conflict triggered by peripheral targets, and support our two-effect model, according to which gaze shares with nonsocial stimuli a domain-general orienting mechanism, but also triggers distinctive processes. Public Significance StatementEye gaze is a relevant cue in our daily social interactions that allows us to communicate information about our focus of attention, emotions, or intentions, among others. Unlike other directional cues of a nonsocial nature (e.g., arrows), gaze has been found to trigger singular attentional effects presumably due to its unique significance. The findings of the present study support this idea as they suggest that apart from conveying spatial information (which is shared with other nonsocial cues), gaze elicits additional social-specific attentional processes. These unique processes can have an impact on our behavior and might presumably underlie several symptoms of conditions in which social cognition is compromised (such as the autistic spectrum disorder). Advances in the knowledge of these processes might broaden our theoretical understanding of social cognition and might lead to new applications and understanding of other phenomena like the well-known inward bias in visual arts.

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“…Asking participants to identify the direction of laterally presented stimuli, Marotta et al . 64 found opposite behavioral and electrophysiological effects for eye-gaze and non-social arrow stimuli. These findings suggest that attention triggered by eye-gaze may represent a process different from that triggered by non-social stimuli, thus producing inconsistency in perception asymmetry for gaze direction here and line bisection.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Fear-specific leftward bias in gaze direction judgment

Yue

Lai

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Previous studies have shown that humans have a left spatial attention bias in cognition and behaviour. However, whether there exists a leftward perception bias of gaze direction has not been investigated. To address this gap, we conducted three behavioural experiments using a forced-choice gaze direction judgment task. The point of subjective equality (PSE) was employed to measure whether there was a leftward perception bias of gaze direction, and if there was, whether this bias was modulated by face emotion. The results of experiment 1 showed that the PSE of fearful faces was significantly positive as compared to zero and this effect was not found in angry, happy, and neutral faces, indicating that participants were more likely to judge the gaze direction of fearful faces as directed to their left-side space, namely a leftward perception bias. With the response keys counterbalanced between participants, experiment 2a replicated the findings in experiment 1. To further investigate whether the gaze direction perception variation was contributed by emotional or low-level features of faces, experiment 2b and 3 used inverted faces and inverted eyes, respectively. The results revealed similar leftward perception biases of gaze direction in all types of faces, indicating that gaze direction perception was biased by emotional information in faces rather than low-level facial features. Overall, our study demonstrates that there a fear-specific leftward perception bias in processing gaze direction. These findings shed new light on the cerebral lateralization in humans.

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Are eyes special? Electrophysiological and behavioural evidence for a dissociation between eye-gaze and arrows attentional mechanisms

Cited by 34 publications

References 60 publications

Irrelevant Robot Signals in a Categorization Task Induce Cognitive Conflict in Performance, Eye Trajectories, the N2 Component of the EEG Signal, and Frontal Theta Oscillations

Irrelevant Robot Signals in a Categorization Task Induce Cognitive Conflict in Performance, Eye Trajectories, the N2 Component of the EEG Signal, and Frontal Theta Oscillations

Target–background segregation in a spatial interference paradigm reveals shared and specific attentional mechanisms triggered by gaze and arrows.

Fear-specific leftward bias in gaze direction judgment

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