The Time Course of Strategic Attentional Control Triggered by Gaze and Arrows: Evidence From a Spatial Stroop...

In spatial Stroop tasks, gaze stimuli elicit a reversed congruency effect, with faster responses when the gaze direction and the location are incongruent than when they are congruent. In contrast, arrow stimuli yield a standard congruency effect, with faster responses under congruent than incongruent conditions. The reversed congruency effect has been attributed to social attentional mechanisms. Contrary to this view, we recently proposed an alternative nonsocial account based on response activation and inhibition. As these processes can be modulated by the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the pre-stimulus and the target, we conducted two preregistered experiments manipulating SOA to test this hypothesis. With a 0-ms SOA, the standard congruency effect and the reversed congruency effect were reliably observed for arrow and gaze stimuli, respectively. However, both effects diminished as the SOA increased. The reduction of the standard congruency effect may reflect weaker transient activation, whereas the reduction of the reversed congruency effect may reflect weaker inhibition. These findings support our hypothesis and highlight the role of activation and inhibition processes in the spatial interference elicited by arrow and gaze stimuli.