**Study Abstract:**
Using a simple gaze cuing task, where an onscreen face looks towards or away from a location where objects subsequently appear, it is generally found that validly cued (looked at) items are processed faster than invalidly cued (looked away from) items, with this effect also being found for non-social arrow cues. However, it is currently unclear how these effects will manifest in a more realistic environment using more dynamic cues. Here, videos of realistic human avatars were shown where the avatar initiated joint attention by looking at the participant and then dynamically looked to the left or right or, in a neutral condition, looked down at the centre of the table. Contextually relevant items (teapot and teacup) then appeared on a table either in the valid location, the invalid location, or equally on the left or right in the neutral condition. In Experiment 1 participants localised a target teacup and in Experiment 2, they discriminated the target as a teapot or teacup. Four stimulus onset asynchronies were used; 150ms, 300ms, 500ms and 1000ms, measured from the start of the head turn such that the effect of gaze on attention was assessed both during the motion and after the motion was complete. The use of the central condition indicated if any cuing effects found were driven by speeding of response to validly cued targets, or a slowing of response to invalidly cued targets. A stick, which displayed similar movement information to the avatar, was presented as a non-social control cue, presented within subjects. Similar cuing effects were seen for the stick and the avatar cue in both the localisation and discrimination tasks. Results showed that the effects were generally faciliatory, i.e. they were driven by speeding of response to validly cued targets with responses being faster for the validly cued targets than in the neutral condition. This is the first time this has been investigated when the gaze cue engages eye contact prior to gaze shift. These dynamic stimuli represent a shift in the study of social cuing, allowing a better understanding of how attention might be cued in more realistic cuing tasks.
**Project contents**
1. A pre-registration
*Note that the registration is specific to the discrimination task, but holds for the localisation task.*
2. Experiment files to run the study
Experiment files for the localization and discrimination task are uploaded as zip files containing the stimuli used and the task as programmed in PsychoPy. The excel sheets contain the trial details. These are contained in the files section. Open Localisation Study (E1) or Discrimination study (E2) and find the experiment in the Experiment master zip files.
**Note that for the experiment files - when run locally the timings are 100ms out, if run online they are correct as written.**
This is due to the use of javascript code for starting the videos in the online version - this starts them at the beginning of the trial, whereas when run locally there is a 100ms fixation time prior to start which was added to ensure that the experiment ran smoothly. This fixation is also displayed online but essentially runs over the beginning of the video, shortening the amount of time the avatar is seen looking down.
Therefore, if running locally, all SOAs in the excel trial sheets (column names SOA) should have 0.1 taken away for correct timing.
3. Data both in raw and processed form.
Data can be found in the files section. Open Localisation Study (E1) or Discrimination study (E2) to find the data zip files. For the raw data a matlab script is also uploaded, saved as a text file to aid data extraction. See also the data dictionary with the raw files.
