Gaze elicits social and nonsocial attentional orienting: An interplay of shared and unique conflict processing mechanisms.

Subtle to no attentional differences have been broadly observed when using gaze and arrows as orienting cues. However, recent studies have found opposite effects when they are used as targets in spatial interference tasks, with arrows eliciting faster responses when their position is congruent with the indicated direction and gaze producing faster responses in incongruent conditions. In two preregistered experiments aimed at exploring the mechanisms supporting these findings, we examined whether the congruency sequence effects (CSE) elicited by gaze and arrows generalized from one stimulus to another, using an intrablock design where the type of stimuli was manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis. Typical CSE were observed for arrows, with a decrease of congruency effects after incongruent trials, and reversed CSE for gaze, with an increased inversion of congruency effects after incongruent trials. Both patterns occurred independently of the preceding type of target, showing that congruency effects can decrease after positive outcomes (e.g., arrow trials following an incongruent gaze trial), and generalized across different nonsocial and social stimuli as shown in a third experiment. These results are consistent with the coexistence of a shared spatial interference component between gaze and arrow trials, potentially responsible for the CSE obtained in switching target trials, and an additional social dimension, exclusively engaged in gaze trials. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).