Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, USA.
Exp Brain Res. 2012 Aug;221(1):115-22. doi: 10.1007/s00221-012-3152-2. Epub 2012 Jul 4.
The appearance of a stimulus in the periphery and the direction of another person's eye gaze have both been shown to automatically orient attention toward the stimulus and the gazed-at location, respectively. In the present experiment, we examined the effects of viewing both a peripheral stimulus and an eye gaze stimulus simultaneously in order to determine whether one is "more automatic" (i.e., faster, dominates) than the other and whether the two processes interact. Using a spatial cueing paradigm, we measured latency of localization of a target stimulus that was validly or invalidly cued by an uninformative (i.e., nonpredictive) peripheral cue, an uninformative eye gaze cue, or both simultaneously (double cue). We included a short and a long cue-target interval in order to investigate the early and late facilitatory and inhibitory effects of the two processes. Results demonstrated that when the double cues were consistent with each other (indicating the same target location), the effects, both early and late, were the same as when the peripheral cue was presented alone. When the double cues were inconsistent (indicating opposite target locations), the late effect was the same as the peripheral cue, but the early effect was intermediate between the two types of cues. Our results better support an interactive, rather than an additive relationship between social and nonsocial automatic orienting. The double cue conditions that showed similar effects to the peripheral cues suggest that the peripheral cue dominates.
刺激出现在外围和另一个人的注视方向都被证明可以分别自动将注意力集中到刺激物和被注视的位置上。在本实验中，我们同时观察了观看外围刺激和注视刺激这两种情况，以确定其中一种刺激是否比另一种刺激更“自动”（即更快、更占主导地位），以及这两个过程是否相互作用。我们使用空间线索范式，测量了目标刺激定位的潜伏期，该目标刺激被一个无信息（即无预测性）的外围线索、一个无信息的注视线索或两者同时（双线索）有效或无效地提示。我们包括了短和长的线索-目标间隔，以研究这两个过程的早期和晚期促进和抑制效应。结果表明，当双线索相互一致（指示相同的目标位置）时，早期和晚期的效果与单独呈现外围线索时相同。当双线索不一致（指示相反的目标位置）时，晚期效果与外围线索相同，但早期效果介于两种线索之间。我们的结果更好地支持了社会和非社会自动定向之间的交互而非叠加关系。表现出与外围线索相似效果的双线索条件表明，外围线索占据主导地位。
