Orienting of covert attention by neutral and emotional gaze cues appears to be unaffected by mild to moderate amblyopia

Abstract

Amblyopia is a developmental disorder of vision associated with higher-order visual attention deficits. We explored whether amblyopia affects the orienting of covert spatial attention by measuring the magnitude of the gaze cueing effect from emotional faces. Gaze and emotion cues are key components of social attention. Participants with normal vision (n = 30), anisometropic (n = 7) or strabismic/mixed (n = 5) amblyopia performed a cued peripheral target detection task under monocular and binocular viewing conditions. The cue consisted of a centrally presented face with left or right gaze (50% validity to target location) and a fearful, happy, or neutral expression. The magnitude of spatial cueing was computed as the reaction time difference between congruent and incongruent trials for each expression. Fearful facial expressions oriented spatial attention significantly more than happy or neutral expressions. The magnitude of the gaze cueing effect in our cohort of mild-to-moderate amblyopia was comparable to that in normal vision and was not correlated with the severity of amblyopia. There were no statistical group or amblyopia subtype differences for reaction time in any viewing condition. These results place constraints on the range of attentional mechanisms affected by amblyopia and possibly suggest normal covert processing of emotional face stimuli in mild and moderate amblyopia.

No Influence of Emotional Faces or Autistic Traits on Gaze-Cueing in General Population

“…Although previous studies in typically developing individuals have reported mixed findings when static facial expressions were the cue stimuli, there is increasing evidence that dynamic facial expressions, changing from neutral to emotional expressions, can modulate the magnitude of the gaze-cueing effect (see Dalmaso et al, 2020 for review). In particular, dynamic fearful faces induce an enhanced gaze-cueing effect compared with neutral faces ( Tipples, 2006 ; Uono et al, 2009a ; Graham et al, 2010 ; Lassalle and Itier, 2013 , 2015b ; Neath et al, 2013 ; Dawel et al, 2015 ; McCrackin and Itier, 2018 ; Chow et al, 2021 ; but see Bayless et al, 2011 ) and other emotional faces ( Putman et al, 2006 ; Bayless et al, 2011 ; Neath et al, 2013 ; McCrackin and Itier, 2018 , 2019 ; Chow et al, 2021 ; however, see Fichtenholtz et al, 2007 , 2009 ; Graham et al, 2010 ; Lachat et al, 2012b ; Uono et al, 2009a ; Lassalle and Itier, 2015a , b ). Evidence suggests that angry ( Lassalle and Itier, 2013 , 2015b ; Pecchinenda and Petrucci, 2016 ; Liu et al, 2019 ) and happy faces ( Graham et al, 2010 ; McCrackin and Itier, 2018 , 2019 ) can enhance the gaze-cueing effect compared to neutral faces, although the enhancement could be less than with fearful faces ( Uono et al, 2009a ; McCrackin and Itier, 2018 , 2019 ).…”

The role of binocular vision in the control and development of visually guided upper limb movements

“…Notably, higher-level deficits in attention, visual search or executive function were demonstrated in adults [58][59][60][61][62][63][64] and children [65] with amblyopia. However, not all aspects of attentional processing are affected, such as for example covert attention [66][67][68]. The pattern of visual deficits varies with the type of amblyopia [69], but in general, individuals with strabismic amblyopia tend to have poorer binocular vision than those with anisometropic amblyopia [69,70].…”