Arrows don’t look at you: Qualitatively different attentional mechanisms triggered by gaze and arrows
Metadatos
Afficher la notice complèteDate
2018Referencia bibliográfica
Published version: Marotta, A., Román-Caballero, R., & Lupiáñez, J. (2018). Arrows don’t look at you: Qualitatively different attentional mechanisms triggered by gaze and arrows. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 25, 2254-2259.
Résumé
Eye gaze conveys rich information concerning the states of mind of others, playing a critical role in social interactions, signaling
internal states, and guiding others’ attention. On the basis of its social significance, some researchers have proposed that eye gaze
may represent a unique attentional stimulus. However, contrary to this notion, the majority of the literature has shown indistinguishable
attentional effects when eye gaze and arrows have been used as cues. Taking a different approach, in this study we
aimed at finding qualitative attentional differences between gazes and arrows when they were used as targets instead of as cues.
We used a spatial Stroop task, in which participants were required to identify the direction of eyes or arrows presented to the left
or the right of a fixation point. The results showed that the two types of stimuli led to opposite spatial interference effects, with
arrows producing faster reaction times when the stimulus direction was congruent with the stimulus position (a typical spatial
Stroop effect), and eye gaze producing faster reaction times when it was incongruent (a Breversed^ spatial Stroop effect). This
reversed Stroop is interpreted as an eye-contact effect, therefore revealing the unique nature of eyes as special social-attention
stimuli.