Made you look! Temporal and emotional characteristics of attentional shift towards gazed locations

Abstract

Studies using a cued gazing paradigm show that attention is reflexively shifted to the gazed-at location. However, there is disagreement as to the factors modulating attention orienting due to gaze cueing. In a series of three experiments, we investigated the role of the emotional expression of the cue (Exp. 1, 2 and 3), cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) (Exp. 2 and 3) and emotional valence of the target (Exp. 3) in the participants’ ability to attend to the target. Experiments 1 and 3 were discrimination tasks. Participants had to differentiate between two neutral targets in Exp. 1 and between two emotionally laden targets (a “square” and a “circle” associated with positive or negative emotions) in Experiment 3. In Experiment 2, participants had to detect a single target presented at different time intervals. The results suggest that attention is oriented towards gazed locations regardless of the accompanying emotional expression, SOA and emotion target association. Thus, eye gaze-mediated attention shifts in normal healthy adults seem to be unaffected by the experimental manipulations studied herein.