Where Is Your Attention? Assessing Individual Instances of Covert Attentional Orienting in Response to Gaze and Arrow Cues

Eye-Gaze direction triggers a more specific attentional orienting compared to arrows

Numerous studies have shown that eye-gaze and arrows automatically shift visuospatial attention. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether the attentional shifts triggered by these two types of stimuli differ in some important aspects. It has been suggested that an important difference may reside in how people select objects in response to these two types of cues, eye-gaze eliciting a more specific attentional orienting than arrows. To assess this hypothesis, we examined whether the allocation of the attentional orienting triggered by eye-gaze and arrows is modulated by the presence and the distribution of reference objects (i.e., placeholders) on the scene. Following central cues, targets were presented either in an empty visual field or within one of six placeholders on each trial. In Experiment 2, placeholder-objects were grouped following the gestalt's law of proximity, whereas in Experiment 1, they were not perceptually grouped. Results showed that cueing one of the grouped placeholders spreads attention across the whole group of placeholder-objects when arrow cues were used, while it restricted attention to the specific cued placeholder when eye-gaze cues were used. No differences between the two types of cues were observed when placeholder-objects were not grouped within the cued hemifield, or no placeholders were displayed on the scene. These findings are consistent with the idea that socially relevant gaze cues encourage a more specific attentional orienting than arrow cues and provide new insight into the boundary conditions necessary to observe this dissociation.

Are there quantitative differences between eye-gaze and arrow cues? A meta-analytic answer to the debate and a call for qualitative differences

Gaze acts from an early age as a cue to orient attention and, thereafter, to infer our social partners' intentions, thoughts, and emotions. Variants of the attentional orienting paradigm have been used to study the orienting capabilities associated to eye gaze. However, to date, it is still unclear whether this methodology truly assesses "social-specific" processes exclusively involved in attention to eye-gaze or the operation of domain-general attentional processes. The present study provides a comprehensive meta-analysis indicating that eye-gaze and non-social directional stimuli, such as arrows, produce equivalent attentional effects. This result casts doubt on the potential utility of the classic cueing task in revealing social-specific processes. On the other hand, we review behavioral evidence suggesting that eye-gaze stimuli may induce higher-order social processes when more specific experimental procedures that analyze qualitative rather than quantitative differences are used. These findings point to an integrated view in which domain-general and social specific processes both contribute to the attentional mechanisms induced by eye-gaze direction. Finally, some proposals about the social components specifically triggered by eye-gaze stimuli are discussed.

What gaze adds to arrows: Changes in attentional response to gaze versus arrows in childhood and adolescence

From early ages, gaze acts as a cue to infer the interests, behaviours, thoughts and emotions of social partners. Despite sharing attentional properties with other non-social directional stimuli, such as arrows, gaze produces unique effects. A spatial interference task revealed this dissociation. The direction of arrows was identified faster on congruent than on incongruent direction-location trials. Conversely, gaze produced a reversed congruency effect (RCE), with faster identifications on incongruent than congruent trials. To determine the emergence of these gaze-specific attentional mechanisms, 214 Spanish children (4-17 years) divided into 6 age groups, performed the aforementioned task across three experiments. Results showed stimulus-specific developmental trajectories. Whereas the standard effect of arrows was unaffected by age, gaze shifted from an arrow-like effect at age 4 to a gaze-specific RCE at age 12. The orienting mechanisms shared by gaze and arrows are already present in 4-year olds and, throughout childhood, gaze becomes a special social cue with additional attentional properties. Besides orienting attention to a direction, as arrows would do, gaze might orient attention towards a specific object that would be attentionally selected. Such additional components may not fully develop until adolescence. Understanding gaze-specific attentional mechanisms may be crucial for children with atypical socio-cognitive development.

Social information rapidly prioritizes overt but not covert attention in a joint spatial cueing task

Coordinating actions with others is crucial for our survival. Our ability to see what others are seeing and to align our visual attention with them facilitates these joint actions. In the present research, we set out to increase our understanding of such joint attention by investigating the extent to which social information would be able to prioritize overt (when moving the eyes to attend) and covert (when shifting attention without eye movements) attention in a joint spatial cueing task. Participants saw a cue and detected a target at the same or a different location alongside an unseen partner of either higher or lower social rank. In a novel twist, participants were led to believe that the cue was connected to the gaze location of their partner. In Experiment 1, where participants were told to not move their eyes (covert attention), the partner's social rank did not change how quickly participants detected targets. But in Experiment 2, where participants were free to move their eyes naturally (overt attention), inhibition of return effects (slower responses to cued than uncued targets) were modulated by their partner's social rank. These social top-down effects occurred already at a short SOA of 150 ms. Our findings suggest that overt attention might provide a key tool for joint action, as it is penetrable for social information at the early stages of information processing.

The misrepresentation of spatial uncertainty in visual search: Single- versus joint-distribution probability cues

The present study used information theory to quantify the extent to which different spatial cues conveyed the entropy associated with the identity and location of a visual search target. Single-distribution cues reflected the probability that the target would appear at one fixed location whereas joint-distribution cues reflected the probability that the target would appear at the location where another cue (arrow) pointed. The present study used a novel demand-selection paradigm to examine the extent to which individuals explicitly preferred one type of probability cue over the other. Although both cues conveyed equal entropy, the main results suggested representation of greater target entropy for joint- than for single-distribution cues based on a comparison between predicted and observed probability cue choices across four experiments. The present findings emphasize the importance of understanding how individuals represent basic information-theoretic quantities that underlie more complex decision-theoretic processes such as Bayesian and active inference.

The Role of Perspective Taking on Attention: A Review of the Special Issue on the Reflexive Attentional Shift Phenomenon

Attention is a process that alters how cognitive resources are allocated, and it allows individuals to efficiently process information at the attended location. The presence of visual or auditory cues in the environment can direct the focus of attention toward certain stimuli even if the cued stimuli are not the individual’s primary target. Samson et al. demonstrated that seeing another person in the scene (i.e., a person-like cue) caused a delay in responding to target stimuli not visible to that person: “alter-centric intrusion.” This phenomenon, they argue, is dependent upon the fact that the cue used resembled a person as opposed to a more generic directional indicator. The characteristics of the cue are the core of the debate of this special issue. Some maintain that the perceptual-directional characteristics of the cue are sufficient to generate the bias while others argue that the cuing is stronger when the cue has social characteristics (relates to what another individual can perceive). The research contained in this issue confirms that human attention is biased by the presence of a directional cue. We discuss and compare the different studies. The pattern that emerges seems to suggest that the social relevance of the cue is necessary in some contexts but not in others, depending on the cognitive demand of the experimental task. One possibility is that the social mechanisms are involved in perspective taking when the task is cognitively demanding, while they may not play a role in automatic attention allocation.

Contextually-Based Social Attention Diverges across Covert and Overt Measures

Humans spontaneously attend to social cues like faces and eyes. However, recent data show that this behavior is significantly weakened when visual content, such as luminance and configuration of internal features, as well as visual context, such as background and facial expression, are controlled. Here, we investigated attentional biasing elicited in response to information presented within appropriate background contexts. Using a dot-probe task, participants were presented with a face-house cue pair, with a person sitting in a room and a house positioned within a picture hanging on a wall. A response target occurred at the previous location of the eyes, mouth, top of the house, or bottom of the house. Experiment 1 measured covert attention by assessing manual responses while participants maintained central fixation. Experiment 2 measured overt attention by assessing eye movements using an eye tracker. The data from both experiments indicated no evidence of spontaneous attentional biasing towards faces or facial features in manual responses; however, an infrequent, though reliable, overt bias towards the eyes of faces emerged. Together, these findings suggest that contextually-based social information does not determine spontaneous social attentional biasing in manual measures, although it may act to facilitate oculomotor behavior.

Combined attention controls complex behavior by suppressing unlikely events

Attention enables behavior by modulating both sensory inputs and task goals. Combining attentional resources from both of those sources exerts qualitatively large effects on manual performance. Here we tested how combined attention was represented in sensory processing, as reflected by the P1 component and associated activity in the alpha band. We measured performance and recorded EEG while participants' attention was engaged in an automated, endogenous, and combined (i.e., automated and endogenous) manner. Behavioral results replicated past reports with reliable effects of isolated automated and endogenous attention, as well as their qualitatively unique combined effect. ERP analyses indicated expected increases in P1 amplitude for validly relative to invalidly cued targets in automated and endogenous conditions. However, in the combined case, the P1 difference between validly relative to invalidly cued targets decreased. Analyses of target-locked alpha-band further revealed that this condition was associated with an increased synchrony in the alpha frequency for invalidly cued targets. This suggests that the large performance benefit observed when attentional systems combine is partly driven by suppressed processing of unexpected targets, dovetailing with the notion that in addition to increasing sensory gain of attended targets, attention may also modulate complex behavior by increasing suppression of unattended ones.