Target–background segregation in a spatial interference paradigm reveals shared and specific attentional mechanisms triggered by gaze and arrows.

Abstract

Recent research has found that eye gaze and arrows yield opposite congruency effects in a spatial interference paradigm, arrows eliciting faster responses when their direction is congruent with their position (standard congruency effect), and gaze producing faster reaction times for incongruent conditions (reversed congruency effect). In addition, we observed by serendipity in a previous study that the standard effect with arrows was reduced when the target appeared within a complex background, presumably because of hindered figure-ground segregation. Under the same conditions, the reversed effect with gaze became more negative. To explain our previous results, we proposed the coexistence of two opposite attentional effects with eye gaze: a standard spatial interference component being common to both arrows and gaze, and a larger social-specific dimension leading to the overall reversion of the effect for gaze. Both in Experiments 1 and 2, gaze or arrow targets were presented after or concurrently with an irrelevant background (asynchronous vs. synchronous conditions, respectively). Consistent with our preregistered hypotheses, the standard effect with arrows was present in the asynchronous condition (automatic figure-ground segregation) but reduced in the synchronous one (difficult figure-ground segregation). Correspondingly with the effect on arrows interference, eye gaze triggered a significant reversed effect in the synchronous condition that decreased in the asynchronous one. These results underline the importance of the figure-ground segregation processes as modulators of the spatial conflict triggered by peripheral targets, and support our two-effect model, according to which gaze shares with nonsocial stimuli a domain-general orienting mechanism, but also triggers distinctive processes. Public Significance StatementEye gaze is a relevant cue in our daily social interactions that allows us to communicate information about our focus of attention, emotions, or intentions, among others. Unlike other directional cues of a nonsocial nature (e.g., arrows), gaze has been found to trigger singular attentional effects presumably due to its unique significance. The findings of the present study support this idea as they suggest that apart from conveying spatial information (which is shared with other nonsocial cues), gaze elicits additional social-specific attentional processes. These unique processes can have an impact on our behavior and might presumably underlie several symptoms of conditions in which social cognition is compromised (such as the autistic spectrum disorder). Advances in the knowledge of these processes might broaden our theoretical understanding of social cognition and might lead to new applications and understanding of other phenomena like the well-known inward bias in visual arts.

Gaze elicits social and nonsocial attentional orienting: An interplay of shared and unique conflict processing mechanisms.

“…Whereas, surprisingly, with social stimuli (full faces and cropped eyes), slower RTs and more errors were observed for congruent versus incongruent trials. This effect observed on social stimuli, referred to by the authors as reversed congruency effect (Cañadas & Lupiáñez, 2012), has been repeatedly replicated since then (Aranda-Martín et al, 2022; Edwards et al, 2020; Ishikawa et al, 2021; Jones, 2015; Marotta et al, 2018, 2019; Narganes-Pineda et al, 2022; Román-Caballero et al, 2021a, 2021b; Torres-Marín et al, 2017). Recently, the same pattern of standard and reversed congruency effects, for arrows and gaze, respectively, has been replicated through a within-participant counterbalanced blocked design (Marotta et al, 2018).…”

“…For example, variables known to reduce spatial congruency effects with arrows could be manipulated to investigate whether they simultaneously increase reversed congruency effects for gaze trials. In this regard, presenting directional targets surrounded by irrelevant context has been found to reduce the spatial congruency effect produced by arrows trials, while leading to a corresponding increase in the reversed congruency effect observed in gaze trials (Román-Caballero et al, 2021a, 2021b).…”

Explicit vs. implicit spatial processing in arrow vs. eye-gaze spatial congruency effects

“…However, this might be for a different reason. As shown by Román-Caballero et al, (2021a, 2021b, this could be due to the fact that the Simon effect, which is present for both arrows and gaze, is eliminated when the targets (either arrows or eyes) are surrounded by a complex background, i.e., the whole face, from which they need to be segregated. The cropped eye stimuli are the same from the whole face, and therefore we consider that the same result would be observed with whole faces (i.e., no implicit RCE) as similar effects are observed for cropped eyes and whole faces when the effect of the background is taken into account (see Román-Caballero et al, 2021b).…”

Eye gaze is not special: The reversed spatial Stroop effect on gaze and tongue targets

“…Simon effect and spatial Stroop effects). According to his hypothesis, the location activation peaks and decays immediately after target onset, so location conflicts would resolve when a temporal gap between location code and response is formed (Hommel, 1993;Juncos-Rabadán et al, 2008;Proctor et al, 2011;Román-Caballero et al, 2021a, 2021b. Román-Caballero et al (2021a) claimed that complex target backgrounds consumed more time for target extraction than simple ones (e.g.…”