Normal and impaired reflexive orienting of attention after central nonpredictive cues

Recent studies suggest that stimuli with directional meaning can trigger lateral shifts of visuospatial attention when centrally presented as noninformative cues. We investigated covert orienting in healthy participants and in a group of 17 right braindamaged patients (9 with hemispatial neglect) comparing arrows, eye gaze, and digits as central nonpredictive cues in a detection task. Orienting effects elicited by arrows and eye gaze were overall consistent in healthy participants and in right brain-damaged patients, whereas digit cues were ineffective. Moreover, patients with neglect showed, at the shortest delay between cue and target, a disengage deficit for arrow cueing whose magnitude was predicted by neglect severity. We conclude that the peculiar form of attentional orienting triggered by the directional meaning of arrow cues presents some features previously thought to characterize only the stimulus-driven (exogenous) orienting to noninformative peripheral cues

Giving subjects the eye and showing them the finger: socio-biological cues and saccade generation in the anti-saccade task.

Pointing with the eyes or the finger occurs frequently in social interaction to indicate direction of attention and one's intentions. Research with a voluntary saccade task (where saccade direction is instructed by the colour of a fixation point) suggested that gaze cues automatically activate the oculomotor system, but non-biological cues, like arrows, do not. However, other work has failed to support the claim that gaze cues are special. In the current research we introduced biological and non-biological cues into the anti-saccade task, using a range of stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). The anti-saccade task recruits both top ^ down and bottom^ up attentional mechanisms, as occurs in naturalistic saccadic behaviour. In experiment 1 gaze, but not arrows, facilitated saccadic reaction times (SRTs) in the opposite direction to the cues over all SOAs, whereas in experiment 2 directional word cues had no effect on saccades. In experiment 3 finger pointing cues caused reduced SRTs in the opposite direction to the cues at short SOAs. These findings suggest that biological cues automatically recruit the oculomotor system whereas non- biological cues do not. Furthermore, the anti-saccade task set appears to facilitate saccadic responses in the opposite direction to the cues

Gaze-cueing of attention: Visual attention, social cognition and individual differences

During social interactions, people's eyes convey a wealth of information about their direction of attention and their emotional and mental states. This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of past and current research into the perception of gaze behavior and its effect on the observer. This encompasses the perception of gaze direction and its influence on perception of the other person, as well as gaze-following behavior such as joint attention, in infant, adult, and clinical populations. Particular focus is given to the gaze-cueing paradigm that has been used to investigate the mechanisms of joint attention. The contribution of this paradigm has been significant and will likely continue to advance knowledge across diverse fields within psychology and neuroscience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved) (journal abstract

Following Gaze: Gaze-Following Behavior as a Window into Social Cognition

In general, individuals look where they attend and next intend to act. Many animals, including our own species, use observed gaze as a deictic (“pointing”) cue to guide behavior. Among humans, these responses are reflexive and pervasive: they arise within a fraction of a second, act independently of task relevance, and appear to undergird our initial development of language and theory of mind. Human and nonhuman animals appear to share basic gaze-following behaviors, suggesting the foundations of human social cognition may also be present in nonhuman brains

Orienting of attention via observed eye-gaze is head-centred

Observing averted eye gaze results in the automatic allocation of attention to the gazed-at location. The role of the orientation of the face that produces the gaze cue was investigated. The eyes in the face could look left or right in a head-centred frame, but the face itself could be oriented 90 degrees clockwise or anticlockwise such that the eyes were gazing up or down. Significant cueing effects to targets presented to the left or right of the screen were found in these head orientation conditions. This suggests that attention was directed to the side to which the eyes would have been looking towards, had the face been presented upright. This finding provides evidence that head orientation can affect gaze following, even when the head orientation alone is not a social cue. It also shows that the mechanism responsible for the allocation of attention following a gaze cue can be influenced by intrinsic object-based (i.e. head-centred) properties of the task-irrelevant cue

Gaze cuing of attention in snake phobic women: the influence of facial expression

Only a few studies investigated whether animal phobics exhibit attentional biases in contexts where no phobic stimuli are present. Among these, recent studies provided evidence for a bias toward facial expressions of fear and disgust in animal phobics. Such findings may be due to the fact that these expressions could signal the presence of a phobic object in the surroundings. To test this hypothesis and further investigate attentional biases for emotional faces in animal phobics, we conducted an experiment using a gaze-cuing paradigm in which participants\u2019 attention was driven by the task-irrelevant gaze of a centrally presented face. We employed dynamic negative facial expressions of disgust, fear and anger and found an enhanced gaze-cuing effect in snake phobics as compared to controls, irrespective of facial expression. These results provide evidence of a general hypervigilance in animal phobics in the absence of phobic stimuli, and indicate that research on specific phobias should not be limited to symptom provocation paradigms

Moving Attention: Social and Nonsocial Attentional Orienting and Consequences of Shifts for Perception

Our visual environment is incredibly complex. This complexity underscores the importance of visual spatial attention as a triaging mechanism for selecting the locations in our environment that are to receive preferential processing. Attentional resources are constantly deployed via shifts of attention across space, or attentional orienting; this orienting response occurs when someone we are speaking with averts their gaze, when a visually salient event occurs, and during countless other everyday events. In studying attentional orienting, two equally important lines of investigation are the factors that affect responsiveness to attentional cues, and how shifting attention alters perception of stimuli at the attended location. The aim of this thesis was to examine outstanding, yet important, questions about these two important aspects of attentional orienting, using the spatial cueing paradigm to manipulate visual spatial attention. The first part of this thesis examined factors that may affect responsiveness to attentional cues, with a specific focus on the orienting response triggered by social cues (e.g., gaze direction), and, at times, nonsocial cues (e.g., arrows). The first study in this section showed that orienting in response to gaze direction remains intact across levels of social anxiety, an individual-differences variable known to be associated with a range of attentional biases. The next study showed that a nonsocial motion signal equivalent in magnitude to a pupil shift is insufficient to elicit orienting, indicating that the social information contained in a dynamic gaze cue - which involves a pupil shift - is important for eliciting an orienting response. The final study in this section examined the efficiency of orienting by arrow cues, dynamic gaze cues, and static gaze cues, and found that while orienting by both types of gaze cues consistently survived a working memory load and therefore appears to be highly efficient, orienting by arrows was sometimes eliminated by a working memory load and therefore appears to be limited in its efficiency. Taken together, these findings speak to the robustness of the gaze-cueing effect, the importance of the social nature of the cue in generating the effect, and the remarkable efficiency of social orienting. The second part of this thesis examined two outstanding issues regarding the perceptual consequences of attentional orienting. In view of some research indicating that involuntary attentional shifts can harm temporal resolution (i.e., the ability to perceive fine temporal detail), the first study in this section examined whether the effect is a true attentional effect, or the outcome of perceptual conflict between the cue and target. The study found evidence to support the latter account, indicating that there is no true effect of involuntary attentional shifts on temporal resolution. The final study of this thesis examined the effects of attention on naturalistic ensemble processing, which involves the visual system pooling local detail to construct a global percept of a scene. The study found no effects of attentional shifts on this process, indicating that naturalistic ensemble processing is remarkably efficient. Together, these results clarify existing ambiguities concerning the effects of attention on important aspects of perception

Assessing the impact of verbal and visuospatial working memory load on eye-gaze cueing

Observers tend to respond more quickly to peripheral stimuli that are being gazed at by a centrally presented face, than to stimuli that are not being gazed at. While this gaze-cueing effect was initially seen as reflexive, there have also been some indications that top-down control processes may be involved. Therefore, the present investigation employed a dual-task paradigm to attempt to disrupt the putative control processes involved in gaze cueing. Two experiments examined the impact of working memory load on gaze cueing. In Experiment 1, participants were required to hold a set of digits in working memory during each gaze trial. In Experiment 2, the gaze task was combined with an auditory task that required the manipulation and maintenance of visuo-spatial information. Gaze cueing effects were observed, but they were not modulated by dual-task load in either experiment. These results are consistent with traditional accounts of gaze cueing as a highly reflexive process