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 the predicted 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. The authors suggest that because there is a neural architecture specialized for processing eyes, gaze-triggered attention is more strongly reflexive than orienting to arrows.