Conflict Tasks of Different Types Divergently Affect the Attentional Processing of Gaze and Arrow.

Lingxia Fan,Huan Yu,Mengdan Sun,Xuemin Zhang,Mengsi Xu,Qing Feng

doi:10.1177/2041669518771713

Lingxia Fan, Huan Yu + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669518771713

Copy DOI

Journal: i-Perception	Publication Date: Apr 1, 2018
Citations: 3	License type: cc-by

Affiliation: Beijing Normal University, Southwest University

Abstract

The present study explored the attentional processing mechanisms of gaze and arrow cues in two different types of conflict tasks. In Experiment 1, participants performed a flanker task in which gaze and arrow cues were presented as central targets or bilateral distractors. The congruency between the direction of the target and the distractors was manipulated. Results showed that arrow distractors greatly interfered with the attentional processing of gaze, while the processing of arrow direction was immune to conflict from gaze distractors. Using a spatial compatibility task, Experiment 2 explored the conflict effects exerted on gaze and arrow processing by their relative spatial locations. When the direction of the arrow was in conflict with its spatial layout on screen, response times were slowed; however, the encoding of gaze was unaffected by spatial location. In general, processing to an arrow cue is less influenced by bilateral gaze cues but is affected by irrelevant spatial information, while processing to a gaze cue is greatly disturbed by bilateral arrows but is unaffected by irrelevant spatial information. Different effects on gaze and arrow cues by different types of conflicts may reflect two relatively distinct specific modes of the attentional process.

Highlights

Throughout our daily lives, our senses are bombarded with so many stimuli that our attentional system needs to select the most relevant information for further processing
This finding demonstrated that both gaze and arrow cues might trigger reflexive attentional orientations such that they disturbed the response to the target even in a task-irrelevant i-Perception 9(3)
A significant difference in the response time in the location-direction corresponding condition and non-corresponding condition was found only when responding to the arrow cue but not to the gaze cue, showing that the processing of gaze was independent of spatial coding, but the processing of arrows was susceptible to irrelevant spatial information

Summary

Introduction

Throughout our daily lives, our senses are bombarded with so many stimuli that our attentional system needs to select the most relevant information for further processing. Facilitation, which results in faster responses for cued target, occurs even at short cue-target stimulus onset asynchronies, and even when the direction of the cue is irrelevant at indicating a subsequent target location (Langton & Bruce, 1999) Based on this standard, event-related potential studies have provided evidence that significant gazecongruent early directing attention negativity and anterior directing attention negativity are observed after the appearance of gaze cues, indicating that reflexive attention shifts to the gaze-cued location occur in advance of target presentation even when the cue is unpredictable (Feng & Zhang, 2014; Li et al, 2010). Other studies have demonstrated that a secondary, resource-consuming task reduced the gazecuing effects, challenging the view that attentional orientations induced by gaze cues meet the reflexive criterion of resisting capacity limitation (Bobak & Langton, 2015; Pecchinenda & Petrucci, 2016)

Methods

Results

Conclusion