Attentional interference is modulated by salience not sentience

Abstract

Spatial cueing of attention occurs when attention is oriented by the onset of a stimulus or by other information that creates a bias towards a particular location. The presence of a cue that orients attention can also interfere with participants' reporting of what they see. It has been suggested that this type of interference is stronger in the presence of socially-relevant cues, such as human faces or avatars, and is therefore indicative of a specialised role for perspective calculation within the social domain. However, there is also evidence that the effect is a domain-general form of processing that is elicited equally with non-social directional cues. The current paper comprises four experiments that systematically manipulated the social factors believed necessary to elicit the effect. The results show that interference persists when all social components are removed, and that visual processes are sufficient to explain this type of interference, thus supporting a domain-general perceptual interpretation of interference.

The Role of Perspective Taking on Attention: A Review of the Special Issue on the Reflexive Attentional Shift Phenomenon

“…These findings, supporting the Perspective-Taking theory, run counter to the "Perceptual" theory, which argues that the perceptual features (i.e., the direction of other's face/nose/posture) are sufficient to explain attentional orientation [14][15][16]. These studies found that human avatars spontaneously orient attention of the observers even when the human avatars cannot see the stimuli either because a physical barrier prevents the view, as in Cole et al [14] or when the cue employed in the dot perspective task does not have a mental state (e.g., an arrow, or a camera) as in Wilson et al [16]. According to this theory, the effects showed in the dot perspective task are due to domain-general processes rather than perspective taking.…”

Reasoning About Visibility in Mirrors: A Comparison Between a Human Observer and a Camera

“…The claim that allocentric information is available to perception is controversial (e.g., Wilson et al 2017). What is novel in this study is that we are focusing on allocentric information for reasoning rather than perception.…”

“…This phenomenon produces the opposite of an egocentric bias: an allocentric bias. However, some recent papers have offered an alternative perceptual interpretation of 4 the phenomenon (Cole et al, 2015;Santiesteban et al, 2014;Wilson et al 2017). According to this perceptual interpretation, people are not directly affected by the others' perspective but rather by basic perceptual directional characteristics of the stimuli.…”

“…According to this perceptual interpretation, people are not directly affected by the others' perspective but rather by basic perceptual directional characteristics of the stimuli. For example, Wilson et al (2017) compared the effects of the presence in the scene of a person with the presence of a camera, and they found no difference. In other words a person has the same function as any other cue that bias spatial attention.…”

“…The social perspective-taking theory has been applied to interpret the Reflexive Shift of Attention (RAS) phenomenon: the attentional interference occurring when our viewpoint is incongruent with a different viewpoint. However, Wilson et al (2017) have argued that the social interpretation of RAS is not necessary and that perceptual mechanisms are sufficient (see also Cole et al, 2015).…”