Eye-gaze orienting to auditory and tactile targets
Poster Presentation

Agnès Alsius
Dept. de Psicologia Bàsica - Facultat de Psicologia, Parc Cientific de BCN

*Scott Sinnett
Dept. de Psicologia Bàsica - Facultat de Psicologia, Parc Cientific de BCN

*Alan Kingstone
Psychology Department, University of British Columbia

*Salvador Soto-Faraco
Dept. de Psicologia Bàsica - Facultat de Psicologia, Parc Cientific de BCN

     Abstract ID Number: 104
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 21, 2005

Abstract
Humans orient their visual attention reflexively in response to social cues such as the direction of someone else’s gaze. However, the consequences of this kind of orienting have only been addressed using visual targets. We investigated whether covert orienting triggered by visible social cues may extend beyond the modality of vision, and induce shifts in tactile and auditory attention. A central non-informative eye-gaze cue (eyes looking laterally) was followed by auditory or vibrotactile targets at different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Targets appeared with equal probability at the cued side or at the opposite (uncued) side. Three different tasks were used to measure the target processing: Speeded detection, speeded discrimination and signal detection. Our results show that while there is no consistent evidence that eye-gaze cues trigger auditory attention shifts, eye-gaze based orienting do facilitate the processing of tactile targets at the gazed-at body location. This demonstrates, for the first time, that social attention cues have consequences that span beyond their own modality.