Gaze-cueing Effect Shows Exogenous Characteristic In An Unambiguous Context

Gaze-cueing effect refers to a phenomenon of attention triggered by observing others’ gaze, which facilitates the processing of upcoming targets at the gazed location. GCE is usually used for short, and is regularly termed by the RT difference between the cued and un-cued location. Adapted from gaze-cueing paradigm, many researches claimed that GCE is a kind of exogenous attention with obvious characters,whereas a few of studies also gained some evidences for endogenous attention. Thus, it’s still contradictory that attention shifting triggered by others’ gaze is in a reflexive or in a voluntary way.The present study made an unambiguous context to test the resistance to suppression from top-down control. Particularly, participants were instructed to ignore the gaze cues since they were totally irrelevant or even to be distractions to their task. Accordingly, the participants were strongly motivated to carry out attention allocation by their voluntary will instead of the gaze.One baseline and two formal experiments were included in this study. Following the classic gaze-cuing paradigm, the baseline experiment explored the time course feature of GCE with identification task. The baseline experiment aimed to(1) provide preference for the specific SOA level of formal experiments and(2) be the GCE baseline to be compared with. The baseline experiment showed that GCE steadily existed at the SOA of 500 ms and died away at the SOA of 1200 ms without following IOR. In experiment a, location-cued graphics were added into the classic gaze-cueing paradigm by being presented at the beginning of each trial. Participants were informed that these graphics could predict the future target location with 100% certain, making the unambiguous context.It was explored whether the top-down control have an effect on GCE. Following experiment a, experiment b was adopted by presenting location-cued graphics at the beginning of each block instead of each trial. These two experiments found GCE had accordance with the baseline result, no matter the graphics were presented between trials or blocks. In specific, GCE was steady at short course(500ms) and vanished at long course(1200ms) without IOR. The current study provided strong evidence for the opinion that GCE is a kind of exogenous attention.