2024/10/01 by Mario Dalmaso, Giovanni Galfano, Luigi Castelli · 1 voice
Psychology · Neuroscience · #Child and Animal Learning Development #Face Recognition and Perception #Action Observation and Synchronization
paper · doi:10.1016/j.concog.2024.103773
openalex publication_date 2024/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/27
• The boundary conditions of automated symbolic orienting were tested. • In four experiments uninformative arrows were used as spatial cues. • Arrow direction was either random or constant within a block of trials. • A 100% informative direction word was also employed in two experiments. • Arrow-mediated orienting of attention survived in all experiments. Arrows trigger reflexive shifts of attention and instantiate the prototypical example of automated symbolic orienting. We conducted four experiments to further test the boundary conditions of this phenomenon. Participants discriminated a peripheral target while spatially uninformative arrows, pointing leftwards or rightwards, appeared at fixation. In all experiments, arrow direction could either randomly vary (intermixed condition) or be kept constant within a block of trials (blocked condition). Moreover, in Experiments 3 and 4, a direction word presented at the beginning of the trial informed participants about the target location with 100% certainty. Overall, the results highlighted a significant arrow-driven orienting effect in both the blocked and the intermixed conditions. The present findings support the notion that automated symbolic orienting is resistant to suppression in that it endures even when the context should stress the uninformative nature of the arrows while also creating ideal conditions to boost participants’ tendency to ignore them.