Orienting of attention with eye and arrow cues and the effect of overtraining

110

Theory of mind is said to be possessed by an individual if he or she is able to impute mental states to others. Recently, some authors have demonstrated that such mental state attributions can mediate the Bgaze cueing^effect, in which observation of another individual shifts an observer's attention. One question that follows from this work is whether such mental state attributions produce mandatory modulations of gaze cueing. Employing the basic gaze cueing paradigm, together with a technique commonly used to assess mentalstate attribution in nonhuman animals, we manipulated whether the gazing agent could see the same thing as the participant (i.e., the target) or had this view obstructed by a physical barrier. We found robust gaze cueing effects, even when the observed agent in the display could not see the same thing as the participant. These results suggest that the attribution of Bseeing^does not necessarily modulate the gaze cueing effect.

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Mental state attribution and the gaze cueing effect

Cole

Smith

Atkinson

2015

110

“…One alternative may be that a minimum time is required for perceptual processing of the cue. Previous research has demonstrated that arrow precues can shift attention in as little as 100 ms after cue onset (Guzzon et al, 2010;Tipples, 2002). This means that our shortest second delay duration of 100 ms provided adequate time (200 ms total after cue onset) for cue processing.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 75%

“…However, the second delay durations were chosen to optimize the likelihood of observing an eccentricity effect. The times were selected on the basis of previously reported attentional shift times for perceptual (Guzzon et al, 2010;Tipples, 2002;Tsal, 1983) and internal (Experiments 1 and 2; Becker et al, 2000) attention. Furthermore, if performance was modulated by item proximity to fixation or grouping effects, it seems reasonable to expect that these benefits would similarly influence both the pre-and retro-cue conditions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Stimulus presentation duration was also shortened to 200 ms to alleviate concerns about possible eye movements and to replicate stimulus durations used in previous research (Lepsien et al, 2005). Duration after cue onset was selected according to reported approximate shift time requirements for both pre-(100 ms) (Guzzon, Brignani, Miniussi, & Marzi, 2010;Tipples, 2002;Tsal, 1983) and retro-(300 ms) (Experiments 1 and 2; Becker et al, 2000) cuing. These durations were selected to provide adequate time for internal attention to shift (based on Experiments 1 and 2) while not providing excessive time for endogenous perceptual attention to shift (Tsal, 1983).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The mental wormhole: Internal attention shifts without regard for distance

Tanoue

Berryhill

2012

Attention operates perceptually on items in the environment, and internally on objects in visuospatial working memory. In the present study, we investigated whether spatial and temporal constraints affecting endogenous perceptual attention extend to internal attention. A retro-cue paradigm in which a cue is presented beyond the range of iconic memory and after stimulus encoding was used to manipulate shifts of internal attention. Participants' memories were tested for colored circles (Experiments 1, 2, 3a, 4) or for novel shapes (Experiment 3b) and their locations within an array. In these experiments, the time to shift internal attention (Experiments 1 and 3) and the eccentricity of encoded objects (Experiments 2-4) were manipulated. Our data showed that, unlike endogenous perceptual attention, internal shifts of attention are not modulated by stimulus eccentricity. Across several timing parameters and stimuli, we found that shifts of internal attention require a minimum quantal amount of time regardless of the object eccentricity at encoding. Our findings are consistent with the view that internal attention operates on objects whose spatial information is represented in relative terms. Although endogenous perceptual attention abides by the laws of space and time, internal attention can shift across spatial representations without regard for physical distance.

“…The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the target and the cue was 200 ms. Subsequently, a target object (face or scrambled face) was presented at the left or right side of the screen for 300 ms. To avoid any differential influence of disengagement from gaze and arrow cues, in this study we used an experimental design comparable with previous studies (Brignani, Guzzon, Marzi, & Miniussi, 2009;Guzzon, Brignani, Miniussi, & Marzi, 2010) whereby the gaze or arrow cue was removed before a target stimulus appeared on the display. The experiment was designed as a localization task.…”

Section: Design and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Target object moderation of attentional orienting by gazes or arrows

Yan

Zhao

Uono

et al. 2016

Recent studies have attempted to demonstrate the importance of the characteristics of directional cues and observers' traits in attentional orienting. This study investigated how attentional orienting is influenced by target processing. Two experiments showed the critical role played by target processing in attentional orienting that relies on eye-gaze and arrow cues. In Experiment 1, stronger attentional orienting was observed under the object-target condition compared with the scrambled-display condition, irrespective of whether gaze or arrow cues were used. The results indicated that meaningful targets produced stronger attentional orienting than did meaningless targets, regardless of the social characteristics of the target. Experiment 2, which investigated whether attentional orienting was influenced by differences in the meaningfulness of targets regardless of their perceptual features, used participants' own faces and the faces of others as target stimuli; one's own face is typically more meaningful than the face of another. The results showed stronger attentional orienting in response to one's own face than in response to another's face under both gaze and arrow conditions. These findings suggest that the use of task-irrelevant meaningful information as targets may be effective in enhancing attention, regardless of perceptual features.Keywords Attentional orienting . Gaze . Arrow . Meaningful information . Self-relevant informationIn our daily lives, we simultaneously encounter various types of information with features of varying levels of importance. Generally, the ability to focus on important information and inhibit attention to other information is vital. This process works rapidly and effectively if directional information is available in the environment. An extensive body of literature has demonstrated that humans automatically orient their attention in the direction of centrally presented cues, such as gazes and arrows. In these studies (for a review, see Birmingham & Kingstone, 2009), a central uninformative cue was used to direct attention toward the right or left of a screen, and a target was presented afterward at either the cued or the opposite location. The response times (RTs) to detect a target were faster if it appeared in the location congruent with the cue rather than in the opposite direction (i.e., cueing effect). The ability to process directional cues (e.g., a conspecific's gaze) rapidly provides an advantage for survival and would therefore be favored during the evolutionary process (Emery, 2000).The majority of studies have investigated how various types of directional cues (e.g., gazes and arrows) trigger Tianyi Yan and Shuo Zhao are first coauthors on this work.