What gaze adds to arrows: Changes in attentional response to gaze versus arrows in childhood and adolescence Aranda Martín, María Belén Ballesteros Duperon, María Ángeles Lupiáñez Castillo, Juan Attentional orienting Development Gaze following Social attention Socio-cognitive development Spatial congruency effect FPU, Grant/Award Number: fpu16/07124 From early ages, gaze acts as a cue to infer the interests, behaviours, thoughts and emotions of social partners. Despite sharing attentional properties with other non-social directional stimuli, such as arrows, gaze produces unique effects. A spatial interference task revealed this dissociation. The direction of arrows was identified faster on congruent than on incongruent direction-location trials. Conversely, gaze produced a reversed congruency effect (RCE), with faster identifications on incongruent than congruent trials. To determine the emergence of these gaze-specific attentional mechanisms, 214 Spanish children (4–17 years) divided into 6 age groups, performed the aforementioned task across three experiments. Results showed stimulus-specific developmental trajectories. Whereas the standard effect of arrows was unaffected by age, gaze shifted from an arrow-like effect at age 4 to a gaze-specific RCE at age 12. The orienting mechanisms shared by gaze and arrows are already present in 4-year olds and, throughout childhood, gaze becomes a special social cue with additional attentional properties. Besides orienting attention to a direction, as arrows would do, gaze might orient attention towards a specific object that would be attentionally selected. Such additional components may not fully develop until adolescence. Understanding gaze-specific attentional mechanisms may be crucial for children with atypical socio-cognitive development. 2022-02-02T09:21:16Z 2022-02-02T09:21:16Z 2022-01-07 journal article Aranda-Martín, B., Ballesteros-Duperón, M. Á., & Lupiáñez, J. (2022). What gaze adds to arrows: Changes in attentional response to gaze versus arrows in childhood and adolescence. British Journal of Psychology, 00, 1– 21. [https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12552] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/72606 10.1111/bjop.12552 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/es/ open access Atribución-NoComercial 3.0 España John Wiley & Sons