Abstract
A direction indicator should attract one's visual attention to the indicated direction effectively. Some studies using Posner's paradigm have showed that human eye gaze may pull our spatial attention to the gazed direction automatically. In this report errors and response times to a target that appears both in the same and the opposite location of the indicated direction were compared in seven types of direction indicators. Subjects participated in a target localization task. Stimulus Onset Asynchronies (SOAs) were set at 100ms, 200ms and 300ms. The responses to the target became either faster or slower when the target appeared in the same or opposite side of the indicated direction respectively when eyes and arrows were used. In contrast, the response times to the target were much less related to the indicated directions when characters were used as an indicator. Statistically significant error rates of responses were observed only when human face was used and the target appeared in the opposite directions.
The results indicate that human faces and/or gazes, when used as a direction indicator, may catch our visual attentions automatically to the indicated directions and may produce response errors when a target actually appears in the different directions. Chinese characters showed some extent of the automatic attention shifts for Japanese participants; English letters showed no such an effect, however.
