The head turn cueing effect is sustained at longer SOA's in the presence of an object distractor

Abstract

In social cueing studies, participants are asked to discriminate a target object cued by social signals, such as eye gaze or head turns. Knowing that the cues are not predictive, participants nevertheless respond faster to the target presented at the cued than uncued location at short Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) intervals of 300 to 600 ms. However, as the SOA between the cue and target increases (1005 ms), the cueing effect diminishes indicating that the reflexivity of social cues can be overridden by voluntary, controlled processes.In the current study, we tested the reflexive and voluntary characteristics of social cues in an object recognition task. In our paradigm, participants were asked to discriminate a circle or square target object appearing in the left or right hand of a human model. On half of the trials, a distractor triangle object appeared in the opposite hand and on the other half of the trials, no distractor object was presented in the opposite hand. The target object was cued by a head turn that appeared at SOA's of 0, 105, 300, 600 or 1005 ms. Participants had to report which target they saw by key press and were told to ignore the head turn because it had no predictive validity. Without a distractor, the typical results were found where a cueing effect was evident at SOAs of 300 and 600 ms and disappeared at the longer 1005 ms SOA. However, in the distractor present condition, a cueing effect was found at the 300, 600 and critically, remained potent at the SOA of 1005 ms. These results call into the question of the reflexive-voluntary account of social cueing effect and suggest that, in the presence of a distractor object, head turn cues cannot be voluntarily inhibited at the long SOA. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012