Visuospatial attention shifts by gaze and arrow cues: an ERP study

Orienting of visual attention can be automatically triggered not only by illumination changes occurring in the visual periphery but also by centrally presented gaze and arrow cues. We investigated whether the automatic shifts of visuospatial attention triggered by centrally displayed gaze and arrow cues rely on the same neural systems. To this end we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to the cue and target onsets while the participants (n=17) performed a spatial cuing task. In the task, the participants detected and responded to laterally presented targets preceded by centrally presented, non-predictive, gaze or arrow cues. Manual reaction times and target-triggered ERP data showed that both gaze and arrow cues automatically oriented attention and facilitated subsequent processing of target stimuli. However, the cue-triggered electrophysiological data indicated that the ERPs elicited by the gaze and arrow cues were different at lateral parietal and fronto-central electrode sites. Most notably, for the arrows, we found a typical early attention direction negativity (EDAN) effect occurring 220-260 ms after the cue onset. The ERPs were shifted in the negative direction when the arrows pointed to a direction which was contralateral to the recorded hemisphere as compared to arrows with ipsilateral direction. This effect was not observed for the gaze stimuli. These results provide further support for earlier behavioral and neuroimaging studies indicating that automatic orienting of attention by arrow cues and gaze cues are based on different neural mechanisms.