Abstract
A wealth of data indicate that central spatially nonpredictive eyes and arrows trigger very similar reflexive spatial orienting, although the effects of eyes may be more strongly reflexive (e.g., Friesen, Ristic, & Kingstone, 2004). Pratt and Hommel (2003) recently reported that the orienting effect for arrows is sensitive to arbitrary cue-target color contingencies; for example, an attentional orienting effect for blue colored arrows is evident only for blue targets. We reasoned that if the orienting effect elicited by eye direction is more strongly reflexive than the orienting effect elicited by arrow direction, it follows that eyes, unlike arrows, may trigger orienting effects that generalize across congruent and incongruent cue-target color contingencies. Replicating Pratt and Hommel (2003), we found that the reflexive attention effect elicited by arrows is specific to color-congruent target stimuli. The attention effect triggered by eyes, however, generalizes across color-congruent and color-incongruent target stimuli. These data support the hypothesis that eye direction and arrow direction trigger similar reflexive shifts in spatial attention, but that the attention effect triggered by eye direction is more strongly reflexive.
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This research was supported by graduate awards to J.R. from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (MSFHR), and the American Psychological Association; and by grants to A.K. from NSERC, the Human Frontier Science Foundation, and MSFHR. We thank Jay Pratt, Bernhard Hommel, Jennifer Stolz, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on a previous version of this article.
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Ristic, J., Wright, A. & Kingstone, A. Attentional control and reflexive orienting to gaze and arrow cues. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 14, 964–969 (2007). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194129
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194129