Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Social interaction involves cues such as gaze direction, headorientation, and pointing gestures that serve to automaticallyorient attention to a specific referent or spatial location. In thispaper we demonstrate that an observed reaching actionsimilarly results in a reflexive shift in attention as evidencedby faster responses that are congruent with the direction of thereach, than responses that are incongruent. This facilitation isevident quickly after the onset of the reach action and is dueto the rapid prediction of the reach-goal. When the taskinvolves a saccadic response (Experiment 1) this prediction isinhibited and results in a reverse-congruence, faster responsesto incongruent than congruent cues, when the cue occurs afterthe reach is completed. This reverse-congruence is not presentwhen the task involves a key press (Experiment 2) or a mousemovement (Experiment 3). We propose that the inhibition ofthe predictive saccade is overcome when the eye movementstoward the goal are activated to guide the mouse movement.The three experiments together demonstrate that automaticattention distribution and its effects on behavior depend onthe response.