Look away! Eyes and arrows engage oculomotor responses automatically

The present study investigates how people’s voluntary saccades are influenced by where another person is looking, even when this is counterpredictive of the intended saccade direction. The color of a fixation point instructed participants to make saccades either to the left or right. These saccade d...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Attention, perception & psychophysics perception & psychophysics, 2009-02, Vol.71 (2), p.314-327
Main Authors: Kuhn, Gustav, Kingstone, Alan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attention
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive Psychology
Color Perception
Communication disorders
Cues
Eye movements
Female
Fixation, Ocular
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Imitative Behavior
Male
Motor Reactions
Orientation
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Perception
Preschool children
Prompting
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
R&D
Reaction Time
Reflex
Research & development
Saccades
Social Perception
Stimuli
Studies
Vision
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Summary:The present study investigates how people’s voluntary saccades are influenced by where another person is looking, even when this is counterpredictive of the intended saccade direction. The color of a fixation point instructed participants to make saccades either to the left or right. These saccade directions were either congruent or incongruent with the eye gaze of a centrally presented schematic face. Participants were asked to ignore the eyes, which were congruent only 20% of the time. At short gaze—fixation-cue stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; 0 and 100 msec), participants made more directional errors on incongruent than on congruent trials. At a longer SOA (900 msec), the pattern tended to reverse. We demonstrate that a perceived eye gaze results in an automatic saccade following the gaze and that the gaze cue cannot be ignored, even when attending to it is detrimental to the task. Similar results were found for centrally presented arrow cues, suggesting that this interference is not unique to gazes.
ISSN:1943-3921
1943-393X
DOI:10.3758/APP.71.2.314