Early saccade planning cannot override oculomotor interference elicited by gaze and arrow distractors

Abstract

Humans tend to perform reflexive saccades according to the eye-gaze direction of other individuals. Here, in two experiments, we tested whether preparing a saccade before the onset of a task-irrelevant averted-gaze stimulus can abolish this form of gazefollowing behavior. At the beginning of each trial, participants received the instruction to prepare for a leftward or a rightward saccade. This was provided either on a trial-by-trial basis (Experiment 1) or was maintained constant within a whole block of trials (Experiment 2). Then, a central fixation spot changed in color, acting as a "go" signal to perform the saccade. Simultaneously with the go-signal onset, a task-irrelevant distractor face looked either leftwards or rightwards. In so doing, no temporal overlapping was likely to occur between saccade preparation and the presentation of the distractor. Arrows were also employed as non-social control stimuli. In both experimentsand regardless of the distractor typesaccadic latencies were smaller when both the instruction and the distractor conveyed the same spatial vector, rather than the opposite. Taken together, these results suggest that an early preparation of saccades is not sufficient to override the oculomotor interference effects elicited by both social and non-social distractors.

Face Masks Do Not Alter Gaze Cueing of Attention: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…In particular, they showed that face scanning behaviour was influenced by this protective gear, since the participants spent more time in examining the periorbital region of mask wearers with respect to faces without the face mask. In a similar vein, it will be important to explore whether faces wearing a mask or not can actually impact on gaze-driven attention to a different extent by applying specific oculomotor tasks (e.g., Dalmaso et al, 2020a; Ricciardelli et al, 2002).…”

Is Face Age Mapped Asymmetrically onto Space? Insights from a SNARC-like Task

“…Indeed, from birth to adulthood, individuals not only grow in age, but they also grow in height, an aspect that could make the spatial mapping of age more adherent to the vertical, rather than horizontal, dimension, at least for faces belonging to a specific age range. Finally, future studies could also collect eye movements [23,24] since, compared to manual responses, they are known to provide a richer data set [53][54][55] and represent a more sensitive and direct index of ongoing visual processing, or even neuroimaging measures, as facial and numerical stimuli would be treated by different cerebral regions [56,57]. Neural measures may also shed fresh light on the role of possible functional hemispheric asymmetries [58] in handling face age dimension.…”

Increased gaze cueing of attention during COVID-19 lockdown

“…To this aim, we developed a gaze-cueing task and delivered it to the same sample of individuals both during and after the lockdown. Arrows, namely other stimuli known to elicit reliable attention shifts (Dalmaso et al, 2020b;Tipples, 2002), were also employed as nonsocial, control cueing stimuli. In so doing, we aimed to identify the selective effects of social isolation on gaze cueing.…”