Attentional Effects of Counterpredictive Gaze and Arrow Cues

The authors used counterpredictive cues to examine reflexive and volitional orienting to eyes and arrows. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of eyes with a novel design that allowed for a comparison of gazed-at (cued) target locations and likely (predicted) target locations against baseline locations that were not cued and not predicted. Attention shifted reflexively to the cued location and volitionally to thepredicted location, and these 2 forms of orienting overlapped in time. Experiment 2 discovered that another well-learned directional stimulus, an arrow, produced a different effect: Attention was shifted only volitionally to the predicted location

Examining the Role of Attention and Intention in Two-year-olds’ Acquisition of Novel Words

Previous studies have demonstrated that infants will use an adult’s eye-gaze direction to identify the intended referent of a novel word (e.g., Baldwin, 1991). Here we examine the possibility that eye-gaze may be triggering attention to an object because of the directional nature of eye-gaze itself. In the first study, we demonstrated that 24-month-olds mapped a novel word to a novel object that had appeared at the location cued by a non-referential cue (i.e., flashing lights). The results of the second study, however, suggest that gaze direction cues do not operate in a similar fashion to non-referential cues. That is, while cueing a specific object with a gaze direction cue led infants to map a novel word to that object, cueing an object location with gaze direction did not result in meaningful word learning. These findings suggest that infants view gaze direction as a marker of intentionality