The time course of strategic attentional control triggered by gaze and arrows: Evidence from a spatial Stroop paradigm

In spatial Stroop tasks, gaze stimuli elicit a reversed congruency effect with faster responses when the gaze direction is incongruent with the location than congruent. In contrast, arrow stimuli yield a standard congruency effect, with faster responses under congruent conditions. The reversed congruency effect has been attributed to social attentional mechanisms. Contrary to this view, we recently proposed an alternative nonsocial account that focuses on response activation and inhibition. As these parameters can be modulated by the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the pre-stimulus and the target, the present study conducted two preregistered experiments by manipulating SOA to test our hypothesis. At the 0-ms SOA, both the standard and reversed congruency effects were reliably observed for arrow and gaze stimuli, respectively. However, as the SOA increased, both effects diminished. The reduction in the standard effect may reflect weakened transient activation, whereas the reduction in the reversed effect may reflect impaired inhibition. These findings support our hypothesis and highlight the role of activation and inhibition processes in spatial interference elicited by arrow and gaze stimuli.