Spatial orienting of attention to social cues is modulated by cue type and gender of viewer.

Across three experiments, we examined the efficacy of three cues from the human body-body orientation, head turning, and eye-gaze direction-to shift an observer's attention in space. Using a modified Posner cueing paradigm, we replicate the previous findings of gender differences in the gaze-cueing effect whereby female but not male participants responded significantly faster to validly cued than to invalidly cued targets. In contrast to the previous studies, we report a robust cueing effect for both male and female participants when head turning direction was used as the central cue, whereas oriented bodies proved ineffectual as cues to attention for both males and females. These results are discussed with reference to the time course of central cueing effects, gender differences in spatial attention, and current models of how cues from the human body are combined to judge another person's direction of attention.

Point Me in the Right Direction: Same and Cross Category Visual Aftereffects to Directional Cues.

Of the many hand gestures that we use in communication pointing is one of the most common and powerful in its role as a visual referent that directs joint attention. While numerous studies have examined the developmental trajectory of pointing production and comprehension, very little consideration has been given to adult visual perception of hand pointing gestures. Across two studies, we use a visual adaptation paradigm to explore the mechanisms underlying the perception of proto-declarative hand pointing. Twenty eight participants judged whether 3D modeled hands pointed, in depth, at or to the left or right of a target (test angles of 0°, 0.75° and 1.5° left and right) before and after adapting to either hands or arrows which pointed 10° to the right or left of the target. After adaptation, the perception of the pointing direction of the test hands shifted with respect to the adapted direction, revealing separate mechanisms for coding right and leftward pointing directions. While there were subtle yet significant differences in the strength of adaptation to hands and arrows, both cues gave rise to a similar pattern of aftereffects. The considerable cross category adaptation found when arrows were used as adapting stimuli and the asymmetry in aftereffects to left and right hands suggests that the adaptation aftereffects are likely driven by simple orientation cues, inherent in the morphological structure of the hand, and not dependent on the biological status of the hand pointing cue. This finding provides evidence in support of a common neural mechanism that processes these directional social cues, a mechanism that may be blind to the biological status of the stimulus category.