The role of eye movements in manual responses to social and nonsocial cues

Abstract

Gaze and arrow cues cause covert attention shifts even when they are uninformative. Nonetheless, it is unclear to what extent oculomotor behavior influences manual responses to social and nonsocial stimuli. In two experiments, we tracked the gaze of participants during the cueing task with nonpredictive gaze and arrow cues. In Experiment 1, the discrimination task was easy and eye movements were not necessary, whereas in Experiment 2 they were instrumental in identifying the target. Validity effects on manual response time (RT) were similar for the two cues in Experiment 1 and in Experiment 2, though in the presence of eye movements observers were overall slower to respond to the arrow cue compared with the gaze cue. Cue direction had an effect on saccadic performance before the discrimination was presented and throughout the duration of the trial. Furthermore, we found evidence of a distinct impact of the type of cue on diverse oculomotor components. While saccade latencies were affected by the type of cue, both before and after the target onset, saccade landing positions were not. Critically, the manual validity effect was predicted by the landing position of the initial eye movement. This work suggests that the relationship between eye movements and attention is not straightforward. In the presence of overt selection, saccade latency related to the overall speed of manual response, while eye movements landing position was closely related to manual performance in response to different cues. Keywords Attention. Eye movements and visual attention. Face perception Orienting spatial attention in response to head turning and eye moving is part and parcel of living in a society. Humans are sensitive to the processing of eye gaze, a preference that is thought to be innate and find its roots in evolution (see, e.g., Hood, Willen, & Driver, 1998). In the course of our lives, we learn to orient attention to more abstract cues like arrows, given that they also convey useful spatial information. We are able to shift our attention according to directions conveyed through signs (e.g., when looking for the right exit from the motorway). Eye gaze or arrows are known as central cuesthat is, stimuli that are presented at the center of the visual field and that enable orientation of attention to another location in space. They differ from peripheral cues, which can capture attention to their location because of an abrupt onset of illumination changes (Posner, 1980). Many studies have been conducted to understand the characteristics of attention orienting to central cues, mainly focusing on the covert component of it (i.e., the orienting of visuospatial attention without observable eye and body movements;

Increased perceptual distraction and task demand enhances gaze and non-biological cuing effects

“…Our findings from Experiments 1 and 2 contrast with those of Xu and Tanaka (2015) and Bonmassar et al (2019) who found that the magnitude of the cuing effect for both gaze and arrow cues was larger when the task was more difficult due to either added distracters or greater target task demands, respectively. Instead, our findings support those of Friesen et al (2005).…”

“…This difference between the effects on attention from gaze and arrow cues is unusual and to our knowledge is the first demonstration of significantly weaker orienting in response to gaze versus arrow cues. Neither Bonmassar et al (2019) nor Xu and Tanaka (2015) found a difference in cuing magnitude between gaze and arrow cues in their bilateral distracter conditions, so it is not simply the removal of sudden target onset (by presenting information on the other side of the cue) that could account for our finding. For Experiment 2, it is notable that there is no significant facilitatory influence of the gaze cue at the 500 ms SOA and the 750 ms SOA, yet there is at the 150, 300, and 1,000 ms SOAs.…”

“…Thus, Bonmassar et al's findings lend further support for an attentional resource and inhibition account of spatial cuing-when task demands are high, it is more difficult to inhibit an attentional response to the central cue, resulting in a stronger cuing effect. Applying this directly to our findings, the stronger overall cuing effect seen in the more difficult discrimination task in Experiment 3 is likely due to participants being less able to inhibit their attention from following the cue signal and thus perhaps checking the cued location for the target before searching the uncued location, as is seen with the eye movements in Bonmassar et al (2019). Our finding of larger cuing magnitudes at 500 versus 150 ms SOA in both low and high-distracter conditions in Experiment 3 (but not in the localisation tasks in Experiments 1 and 2) further lends support for this, suggesting that directional cues are utilised to a greater degree when task demands are high, perhaps to try to help ease the cognitive burden.…”

“…The findings of Bonmassar et al (2019) may also help interpret our pattern of results. They investigated the influence of task demands on the effect of non-predictive gaze and arrow cues on both eye movements and RTs within an easy versus hard shape discrimination task.…”

Contextually-Based Social Attention Diverges across Covert and Overt Measures

“…This result adds to the growing body of evidence demonstrating dissociations between covert and overt measures of social attention, in that the two modes of orienting appear to serve different purposes in real-world social environments—covert attention is hypothesized to serve as a mechanism that surreptitiously gathers information from the environment, while overt attention is hypothesized to serve as an active signaling mechanism in order to communicate with others [44,92,93,94,95]. These dissociations have only just begun to be probed on an experimental level [42,96,97,98,99], with the present study along with Pereira and colleagues’ [45] study providing direct evidence in support of this distinction. Future studies in which covert and overt attention are systematically manipulated and measured are needed to understand the nature of this dissociation.…”