Is the reversed congruency effect unique to the eye-gaze? Investigating the effects of finger pointing, eye-gaze and arrows stimuli on spatial interference

Bonventre, Sofia; Marotta, Andrea · 2023 · Crossref

DOI: 10.3389/fcogn.2023.1135435

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Summary

This study investigates whether the "reversed spatial congruency effect" (RCE) is unique to eye-gaze stimuli or if it generalizes to other socio-biological cues, specifically finger pointing. Previous research using spatial interference tasks has demonstrated that while non-social stimuli like arrows produce a standard spatial congruency effect (SCE)—where reaction times are faster when stimulus direction matches its spatial position—eye-gaze stimuli produce an RCE, with faster responses when gaze direction is incongruent with its position. This dissociation suggests that gaze processing involves unique social mechanisms, such as theory of mind or joint attention, rather than simple directional cueing. The authors aimed to determine if finger pointing, another powerful referential cue, elicits the same RCE or behaves like arrows. The research employed two experiments using a spatial interference task. In both experiments, participants responded to the direction indicated by stimuli (eye-gaze, arrows, or pointing fingers) presented to the left or right of a fixation cross. Experiment 1 involved 24 participants who completed separate blocks for each stimulus type. Experiment 2 involved 22 participants and used a within-block design where stimulus types were randomly interspersed to control for potential strategy shifts between blocks. Reaction times and error rates were analyzed using repeated measures ANOVA, examining the interaction between target type and congruency. The results consistently showed that the RCE was specific to eye-gaze stimuli. In both experiments, participants responded significantly faster to incongruent gaze trials than congruent ones. Conversely, both arrow and finger-pointing stimuli elicited the standard SCE, with faster reaction times for congruent trials compared to incongruent ones. Error analyses mirrored these findings: participants made more errors on incongruent trials for arrows and fingers, but no significant difference in errors was observed for gaze trials in Experiment 1, and the pattern remained consistent in Experiment 2. The within-block design of Experiment 2 confirmed that these effects were robust and not artifacts of block-specific strategies. These findings indicate that the reversed congruency effect is unique to eye-gaze and does not generalize to finger-pointing stimuli. This supports the hypothesis that gaze processing engages specific social-cognitive mechanisms, such as mentalizing or joint attention, that are not activated by pointing gestures or non-social directional cues. The study reinforces the distinction between gaze and other referential cues in attentional orienting, suggesting that while both gaze and pointing guide attention, only gaze triggers the specific cognitive processes responsible for the RCE. This contributes to the broader understanding of social attention by highlighting the specialized nature of eye-gaze processing in human cognition.

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