Exposing the cuing task: the case of gaze and arrow cues

The prevailing theoretical accounts of social cognitive processes propose that attention is preferentially engaged by social information. However, empirical investigations report virtually indistinguishable attention effects for social (e.g., gaze) and nonsocial (e.g., arrow) stimuli when a cuing task is used. Here, we show that this discrepancy between theory and data reflects a difference in how the extraneous processes induced by the cuing task's parameters (i.e., tonic alertness and voluntary temporal preparation) modulate cue-specific attentional effects. Overall, we found that tonic alertness and voluntary temporal preparation interacted within the cuing task, resulting in underadditive magnitudes of spatial orienting and superadditive magnitudes of the foreperiod effect. However, those interactions differentially affected social and nonsocial attention. While typical rapid social orienting was resilient to changing task parameters, sustained social orienting was eliminated only when the contribution of both extraneous processes was reduced. In contrast, orienting elicited by nonsocial arrows grew in magnitude with the reduction of voluntary temporal preparation and was delayed by the joint reduction of tonic alertness and voluntary temporal preparation. Together, these data indicate that cue-specific attention effects are masked by task dynamics of the cuing paradigm and highlight a pivotal role of the cuing task parameters in both the measurement and the theoretical attribution of spatial attention effects.