Abstract
The aim of this study was to examine the effects of biological or nonbiological cues on reflexive orienting. Twelve university students participated in Experiment 1, in which a target which was presented in the left or the right visual field followed the gaze face or the arrow and they were required to detect the target. The results showed that the response to the target presented at the side where the eyes gazed toward and where the arrow indicated was faster than that presented at the reversed side in the SOA-100 ms and the SOA-550 ms conditions. Such a cueing effect obtained for the gaze-cue and the arrow-cue disappeared in the SOA-1000 ms condition. These findings suggested that the reflexive orienting from the arrow as well as the gaze would accrue. Thirty-six university students participated in Experiment 2. They were divided into the three groups, and each group was given the following three types of localization tasks. One was the gaze-cueing task which was the same as the Experiment 1. The second one was the arrow-cuing task which was also the same as the Experiment 1. The last one was Kanji-cueing task in which the target followed a Kanji character which means "left" or "right". The results supported the findings in Experiment 1. That is, the gaze-cue and the arrow-cue accrued the reflexive orienting. On the contrary the Kanji-cue did not. The mechanism of reflexive orienting from eye, arrow, and word (Kanji) were discussed.
