Hand, but not foot, cues generate increases in salience at the pointed-at location

The Bias toward the Right Side of Others Is Stronger for Hands than for Feet

“…Accordingly, the findings of Experiments 2 and 3 that the bias for the right hand is stronger than that for the right foot might be due to the fact that the prevalence of right-handedness is larger than that of right-footedness [8], corroborating the role of visual experience in action recognition [66,67]. On the other hand, such findings might also be ascribed to the fact that hands represent more relevant body parts compared with feet (e.g., see [74]), the former providing more information than the latter as regards both communicative and aggressive acts (which could also account for why a preference to perceive right-handed rather than right-footed actions is observed when silhouettes with one arm and the contralateral leg extended are shown). Future studies should assess whether attentional and perceptual asymmetries toward the right side of human bodies are phylogenetically (because of the evolutionarily adaptive advantage of directing attention toward the dominant limbs of others) or ontogenetically (because of prolonged exposure to right-limbed individuals) determined.…”

“…This first experiment confirmed the presence of a bias toward the right side of observed bodies reported in previous studies [40][41][42][43][44], but not the predictions that such a bias would have been stronger for the hand compared with the foot and for a more complex compared with a simpler action. However, it is plausible that a difference between upper and lower limbs might emerge when the ambiguous stimulus depicts a human figure with one arm and the contralateral leg extended, given that hands could represent more salient stimuli compared with feet (e.g., see [74]). Moreover, whereas our previous studies [40,43] included stimuli rotating both inward and outward with reference to the extended limb, in this first experiment we included only stimuli rotating inward in order to use stimuli as realistic as possible (a ball is usually handled with the palm rather than the back of the hand).…”

Social gaze cueing elicits facilitatory and inhibitory effects on movement execution when the model might act on an object

“…Doing so mitigated the discrepancy between the head-only and finger-only stimuli and produced similar results in the reach trajectory as those reported in the finger-only experiment of Yoxon et al This overall set of findings implies that a gaze cue that is made more socially- or action-relevant (via the presence of implied action) may be crucial in enabling the gaze cue’s effect on motor execution and control. Consistent with this idea, Chen et al (2020) compared the cueing effect of a pointing finger with that of a pointing foot. Whereas the hand cue elicited the facilitation effect, the foot cue did not.…”

Foot cues can elicit covert orienting of attention

“…On the other hand, and of particular interest for the present work, another recent study (Chen et al, 2020 ) employed a spatial cueing task in which the picture of a human hand with the index finger pointing left or right, and the picture of a naked human foot oriented leftward or rightward, were used as spatial cues and presented in two distinct blocks of trials. After either 100 or 1000 ms, a peripheral target appeared that was to be localised with either a manual or foot response.…”

“…A reliable orienting of attention emerged for the pointing finger but not for the foot stimulus, and this emerged regardless of the responding effector. Chen et al ( 2020 ) concluded that the lack of an attentional orienting effect for the foot stimulus could reflect the fact that, in our everyday social interactions, we scarcely use our feet to convey a message of spatial nature, which is something that certainly cannot be said for finger-pointing stimuli. Furthermore, Chen et al ( 2020 ) also suggested that the foot stimulus used in their study belonged to a stationary person (i.e., an individual standing upright) and was therefore not associated with a clear and strong pointing position.…”