Elsevier

Acta Psychologica

Volume 150, July 2014, Pages 100-105
Acta Psychologica

Attention orienting by eye gaze and arrows reveals flexibility to environmental changes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2014.05.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The differences between gaze and arrows become apparent in a rich environment.

  • Enhanced orienting was found when using gaze or arrow as cue in a simple environment.

  • Enhanced orienting was found when using social cue and target in a rich environment.

  • Participants employ a flexibly strategy to responding environmental changes.

Abstract

This study aimed to evaluate the difference in non-predictive cues between gaze and arrows in attention orienting. Attention orienting was investigated with gaze or arrows as separate cues in a simple condition (i.e., block design) in Experiment 1 and in an unpredictable condition (i.e., randomized design) in Experiment 2. Two kinds of sound (voice and tone) stimuli were used as targets. Results showed that gaze and arrow cues induced enhanced attention orienting to a voice versus tone target in the block condition. However, in the randomized condition, enhanced attention orienting to a voice versus tone target was found in gaze but not arrow cues. The congruency of the meaning between a social cue (i.e., gaze) and a social target (i.e., voice) was clear in the randomized but not blocked design, because social gaze and non-social arrow cues were implemented in the same block. Thus, attention orienting might be mediated by the associated relationship of cue–target in a randomized condition, as an enhanced orienting effect was found when the associated relationship of cue–target was strong (i.e., social cue and target). The present study suggests that the difference in attention orienting between gaze and arrows is apparent in a randomized design (the unpredictable condition), and people employ a flexibly strategy of orienting to better respond to environmental changes.

Introduction

Attention orienting plays an important role in our everyday life, and a variety of cues are used as triggers of attentional orientation. For example, social signs such as eye gaze reflect a uniquely human ability underlying social communication. It would help us to better identify a person's focus and understand their thoughts, intentions, beliefs, and desires, when observing their gaze during human interactions (Baron-Cohen, 1995). Similar to social signs, non-social signs also influence our attention orienting every day, such as an arrow on a road sign. Nevertheless, compared with eye gaze, an arrow does not have the social immediacy of a person looking or sharing interactions.

In the past several years, many studies have focused on comparing the role of directional gaze and arrows in attention orienting. These studies commonly investigated attention orienting by gaze and arrows using the modified version of Posner's cueing paradigm (Posner, 1980). For example, Friesen and Kingstone (1998) presented uninformative gazes as cues (directed toward right or left), indicating the location of the target (appearing on the right or left). The reaction times (RTs) to detect a target are faster when the target appears in the same direction as the cues than in the opposite direction.

Most of these studies provided evidence of similar shifts of attention orienting when an arrow instead of a gaze was used as the cue (Bayliss and Tipper, 2005, Borjon et al., 2011, Kuhn and Kingstone, 2009, Tipples, 2002). Contrary to these findings, some researchers have proposed that attention orienting was different between gaze and arrows. A previous study (Marotta, Lupiáñez, Martella, & Casagrande, 2012) found that an object-based effect occurred only when an arrow was presented as a cue to orienting, whereas a location-based effect only occurred with eye gaze as the cue. Furthermore, another recent study (Friesen, Ristic, & Kingstone, 2004) using the counterpredictive paradigm (the target was more likely to appear in the location opposite the one indicated by the cue) found that reflexive orienting shifts to the cued locations were only observed when using gaze as the cue. These studies only implemented gaze and arrows as cues, separately, in a simple environment (i.e., block condition). In real life, however, eye gaze and arrows are often mixed, and therefore a different division of roles may occur in a complex environment, which is related to the ability of how to rapidly respond to danger. Therefore, it is also important to investigate attention orienting between gaze and arrow cues when they are embedded in a rich environment, which is suggested to be the only apparent difference between them (Birmingham & Kingstone, 2009).

Previous studies have reported that attention orienting is influenced by target processing. Some studies reported that joint attention occurred using interest-related materials following training in subjects with autism spectrum disorder who have impaired joint attention (Kryzak et al., 2013, Naoi et al., 2008). Another study found an enhanced effect of attention orienting when using a social stimulus as the target; that is, a greater effect of orienting was found when the target appeared on a face than a scrambled face in participants with low autistic-like traits (Bayliss & Tipper, 2005). Additionally, in our study (Zhao, Uono, Yoshimura, Kubota, & Toichi, 2013), an associated relationship between cue and target was proposed to explain a similar enhanced orienting effect when using sounds as the targets. Greater gaze-triggered orienting was found when voice was the target rather than tone, indicating that a strongly associated relationship between gaze and voice may elicit an enhanced effect on attention orienting. However, it is still not understood whether the associated relationship of cue–target can also be used with arrows as cues, and it may be possible to reflect different attention orienting between gaze and arrows when they are mixed in a rich environment.

In the present study, we examined attention orienting with gaze and arrows as cues using Posner's cueing paradigm under a block design (simple condition) (Experiment 1) and a randomized design (unpredictable condition) (Experiment 2). In addition, we manipulated two sounds as targets, i.e., social voice and non-social tone, to refer the associated relationship between the cue and target. The aims of the study were (1) to investigate whether attention orienting between gaze and arrows as cues could be distinguished by the associated relationship of cue–target and (2) to examine whether attention orienting between gaze and arrows as cues might only become apparent under the unpredictable condition, which seems closer to a real environment than the simple condition.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

In Experiment 1, we manipulated attention orienting between gaze and arrow cues by two types of sounds as targets (voice and tone) under a block condition.

Experiment 2

While Experiment 1 compared the difference between gaze and arrows when using voice and tone as targets in the block condition, a comparable orienting effect was found between gaze and arrow. However, the difference in orienting effects between eye gaze and arrows may be easy to identify in a complex environment. Birmingham and Kingstone suggested the possibility that key differences between social and non-social cues may only become apparent when they are embedded within a rich environment (

General discussion

The present study investigated the effect of attention orienting by sound targets (i.e., voice and tone) between gaze and arrows in simple and unpredictable conditions. Given the results of Experiments 1 and 2, attention orienting was influenced by the associated relationship between cue and target. Particularly in the unpredictable condition, the enhanced cueing effect to the voice target was found only in the gaze cue condition. This result suggests that the difference in attention orienting

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