Authors: Paola Ricciardelli Samuele Carcagno Giuseppe Vallar Emanuela Bricolo
Publish Date: 2012/10/13
Volume: 224, Issue: 1, Pages: 93-106
Abstract
Distracting gaze has been shown to elicit automatic gaze following However it is still debated whether the effects of perceived gaze are a simple automatic spatial orienting response or are instead sensitive to the context ie goals and task demands In three experiments we investigated the conditions under which gaze following occurs Participants were instructed to saccade towards one of two lateral targets A face distracter always present in the background could gaze towards a a taskrelevant target––“matching” goaldirected gaze shift––congruent or incongruent with the instructed direction b a taskirrelevant target orthogonal to the one instructed “nonmatching” goaldirected gaze shift or c an empty spatial location nogoaldirected gaze shift Eye movement recordings showed faster saccadic latencies in correct trials in congruent conditions especially when the distracting gaze shift occurred before the instruction to make a saccade Interestingly while participants made a higher proportion of gazefollowing errors ie errors in the direction of the distracting gaze in the incongruent conditions when the distracter’s gaze shift preceded the instruction onset indicating an automatic gaze following they never followed the distracting gaze when it was directed towards an empty location or a stimulus that was never the target Taken together these findings suggest that gaze following is likely to be a product of both automatic and goaldriven orienting mechanismsThis research was supported by a grant from the Ministero dell’Istruzione dell’Università e della Ricerca PRIN project 2008ZN5J5S 004 awarded to PR EB and GV were supported by a grant from Università di MilanoBicocca Fondo di Ateneo 2010 GV was also supported in part by a Ricerca Corrente Grant from the IRCCS Italian Auxological Institute We thank Gustav Kuhn Lauri Nummenmaa and one anonymous reviewer for their comments and important suggestions on an earlier version of the manuscript We would like to thank Giuseppe Fenaroli for his assistance in data collection and Flavia Mancini for useful discussion Thanks to Tim Vaughan for revising the English The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest
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