Resolving conflicting views: Gaze and arrow cues do not

It has become widely accepted that the direction of another individual’s eye gaze induces rapid, automatic, attentional orienting, due to it being such a vital cue as to where in our environment we should attend. This automatic orienting has also been associated with the directional-arrow cues used in studies of spatial attention. Here, we present evidence that the response-time cueing effects reported for spatially nonpredictive gaze and arrow cues are not the result of rapid, automatic shifts of attention. For both cue types, response-time effects were observed only for long- duration cue and target stimuli that overlapped temporally, were largest when the cues were presented simultaneously with the response-relevant target, and were driven by a slowing of responses for invalidly cued targets rather than speeding for validly cued ones. These results argue against automatic attention-orienting accounts and support a novel spatial-incongruency explanation for a whole class of rapid behavioural cueing effects