Reflexive Orienting to Pointing Hands and Arrows

Directional cues, such as averted gaze and arrows influence spatial attention (e.g., Kuhn & Kingstone, 2009; Tipples, 2008), with some evidence of automatic effects for biologically relevant but not non-biologically relevant stimuli (Friesen et al., 2004). The current study was designed to extend this investigation to other deictic gestures; specifically, to examine the influence of pointing hands and arrows on spatially cued responses. A two-alternative forced choice response time paradigm was used to test localization of a peripheral target (an asterisk) that appeared to the right or left of a pointing hand or arrow stimulus cue that appeared for a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 100 or 600 ms. Participants were instructed that on 75% of the trials the stimulus cue was counterpredictive of the target location. Nevertheless, responses were faster when the stimulus cue was congruent with the target at the 100 ms SOA, and, conversely, were faster when the stimulus cue was incongruent with the target at the 600 ms SOA. Contrary to the evidence for automatic cueing of attention via eye gaze as greater than via arrows, these results show that both hand and arrow automatically orient covert attention equally at short SOAs.