Averted body postures facilitate orienting of the eyes

It is well established that certain social cues, such as averted eye gaze, can automatically initiate the orienting of another's spatial attention. However, whether human posture can also reflexively cue spatial attention remains unclear. The present study directly investigated whether averted neutral postures reflexively cue the attention of observers in a normal population of college students. Similar to classic gaze-cuing paradigms, non-predictive averted posture stimuli were presented prior to the onset of a peripheral target stimulus at one of five SOAs (100ms-500ms). Participants were instructed to move their eyes to the target as fast as possible. Eye-tracking data revealed that participants were significantly faster in initiating saccades when the posture direction was congruent with the target stimulus. Since covert attention shifts precede overt shifts in an obligatory fashion, this suggests that directional postures reflexively orient the attention of others. In line with previous work on gaze-cueing, the congruency effect of posture cue was maximal at the 300ms SOA. These results support the notion that a variety of social cues are used by the human visual system in determining the "direction of attention" of others, and also suggest that human body postures are salient stimuli capable of automatically shifting an observer's attention.