Cross-category attentional biases driven by visual mental imagery of social cues

In cluttered and complex natural scenes, selective attention enables the visual system to prioritize relevant information. This process is guided not only by perceptual cues but also by imagined ones. The current research extends the imagery-induced attentional bias to the unconscious level and reveals its cross-category applicability between different social cues (e.g., eye gaze and biological motion). Using a visual imagery task combined with an attentional bias paradigm, we showed that imagining a gaze cue biased selective attention toward the imagery-matching eye gaze. Removing the imagery task obliterated the attentional effect, emphasizing the pivotal role of mental imagery in driving the observed results. Furthermore, the attentional bias persisted even when the physically presented eye gazes were rendered invisible, suggesting the automaticity of the effect and a dissociation between attention and consciousness. When the imagery content involved biological motion cues, cross-categorical attentional bias toward imagery-matching eye gaze was evident. However, this cross-categorical effect did not extend to nonsocial arrow cues-imagining an arrow cue failed to bias attention toward imagery-matching eye gaze, though arrow cues induced within-categorical attentional biases for imagery-matching arrows. These findings point to the existence of shared mechanisms dedicated to processing different social cues rather than nonsocial cues. Taken together, the present study highlights a novel mechanism through which social cue-based imagery guides spatial attention, which operates independently of visual awareness and is supported by a dedicated social module, shedding light on the intricate interplay between the internal mental representations and the external physical world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).