ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1636726
This article is part of the Research TopicIntegrating motivation and attention: behavioral and neural perspectivesView all 4 articles
Social and Non-social Directional Cues Differentially Orient Attention by Learned Habit
Provisionally accepted
- 1SmArt Lab, IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation, 00179 Rome, Italy, Rome, Italy
- 2Department of Psychology, Bournemouth University, U.K., Poole, United Kingdom
- 3Department of Human Sciences, Guglielmo Marconi University, Rome, Italy, Rome, Italy
- 4Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
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Introduction -Since early age we are implicitly motivated to use the direction of eye gaze of others to learn about the environment and we orient our attention in space based on this directional signal.Similarly, we orient our attention based on the direction of arrow signs. In both cases, the mechanisms underlying attentional orienting rely on the activity of brain areas involved in endogenous attention but only orienting by gaze direction also relies on brain areas involved in exogenous attention.Research Questions -To date, it is unclear whether the acquisition of attentional habit, which can also guide attention in a way that is not purely endogenous or exogenous, is similar for gaze and arrow or rather differs in some important way. We assessed whether learning implicit regularities implemented with exogenous, arrow, and gaze stimuli guides attention in space.Methods -Using the Posner paradigm, we conducted a series of behavioural experiments with exogenous, arrow, and gaze cues, and unbeknownst to participants, specific regularities -namely cue predictive validity and probability cueing -were implemented through blocks (baseline, learning, testing).Results and Discussion -Findings show that predictive validity alone is not sufficient to engender habitual attention for all types of cues, but it is when combined with probability cueing. Importantly, learned habit with gaze cues guides attention in a unique way from the other cues.Conclusion -Socially relevant directional signals such as gaze can bias spatial attention more effectively than perceptual or non-social, directional stimuli.
Keywords: selective attention, spatial orienting, arrow cueing, gaze cueing, learned habit, predictive validity, probability cueing, statistical learning
Received: 28 May 2025; Accepted: 27 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Salera, Yankouskaya, Petrucci and PECCHINENDA. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: ANNA PECCHINENDA, Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
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