From an early age, attentional orienting to others’ eye-gaze serves as a crucial cue to understand their interests and emotions. The question of whether the attentional orienting properties of eye gaze are unique and distinguishable from those of non-social orienting stimuli, such as arrows, has been widely debated. Recent research using a spatial interference task has shown opposite behavioural patterns for gaze and arrows when the direction of lateralized arrows or gaze needs to be discriminated. While the typical congruency effect has been observed for arrows —faster responses on congruent compared to incongruent direction/location trials — gaze elicits a reversed congruency effect (RCE), with faster responses on incongruent trials. Furthermore, the emergence of this gaze-specifics mechanism has been studied in children and adolescents aged 4 to 17 years, revealing a stimulus-specific developmental trajectory. Findings indicate that the standard effect triggered by arrows remains stable across ages, whereas eye-gaze shifts from eliciting the standard effect in early childhood to producing the gaze-specific RCE only from age 12 onward. This evidence suggests that, as individuals mature, gaze develops into a distinct social cue with specialized attentional orienting properties. While research on the RCE has primarily attributed its emergence to the social nature of gaze, a recent alternative explanation suggests that it could also stem from the difficulty of extracting task-relevant information from the stimuli, as a recent study found that when arrows are presented with a complex background, they elicit the same RCE observed with eye-gaze. The present study aims to investigate, in samples of 4- and 12-year-old children, whether this pattern also holds across different age groups, hypothesizing that if the RCE is driven by the process of extracting task-relevant information rather than the unique social properties of gaze, complex arrows should follow the same stimulus-specific developmental trajectory observed with eye-gaze.
Chacón-Candia et al. (Wed,) studied this question.