Department of Experimental Psychology, and Mind, Brain, and Behavior Research Center (CIMCYC), University of Granada, Granada, Spain.
Dipartimento di Psicologia, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy.
PLoS One. 2023 Jan 25;18(1):e0280955. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0280955. eCollection 2023.
Numerous studies have shown that eye-gaze and arrows automatically shift visuospatial attention. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether the attentional shifts triggered by these two types of stimuli differ in some important aspects. It has been suggested that an important difference may reside in how people select objects in response to these two types of cues, eye-gaze eliciting a more specific attentional orienting than arrows. To assess this hypothesis, we examined whether the allocation of the attentional orienting triggered by eye-gaze and arrows is modulated by the presence and the distribution of reference objects (i.e., placeholders) on the scene. Following central cues, targets were presented either in an empty visual field or within one of six placeholders on each trial. In Experiment 2, placeholder-objects were grouped following the gestalt's law of proximity, whereas in Experiment 1, they were not perceptually grouped. Results showed that cueing one of the grouped placeholders spreads attention across the whole group of placeholder-objects when arrow cues were used, while it restricted attention to the specific cued placeholder when eye-gaze cues were used. No differences between the two types of cues were observed when placeholder-objects were not grouped within the cued hemifield, or no placeholders were displayed on the scene. These findings are consistent with the idea that socially relevant gaze cues encourage a more specific attentional orienting than arrow cues and provide new insight into the boundary conditions necessary to observe this dissociation.
许多研究表明，眼动和箭头会自动转移视觉空间注意力。尽管如此，目前尚不清楚这两种类型的刺激引发的注意力转移在某些重要方面是否存在差异。有人认为，一个重要的区别可能在于人们如何根据这两种类型的线索选择对象，眼动比箭头引起更具体的注意力定向。为了评估这一假设，我们考察了注视和箭头引发的注意力定向分配是否受到场景中参考对象（即占位符）的存在和分布的调节。在中央线索之后，目标要么出现在空的视野中，要么出现在每次试验的六个占位符之一中。在实验 2 中，占位符对象按照格式塔的邻近律分组，而在实验 1 中，它们没有被感知分组。结果表明，当使用箭头线索时，提示一个分组占位符会将注意力分散到整个占位符对象组上，而当使用眼动线索时，它会将注意力限制在特定提示的占位符上。当占位符对象不在提示的半视野内分组，或者场景中没有显示占位符时，两种类型的线索之间没有观察到差异。这些发现与这样一种观点一致，即与社会相关的注视线索比箭头线索更能鼓励更具体的注意力定向，并为观察这种分离所需的边界条件提供了新的见解。
