The Influence Of Face Rotation On Gaze-cueing Effect

Gaze-cueing effect is the phenomenon that attention will be reflexively oriented to the direction of gaze-cue and facilitate the reaction towards the cueing direction.Orienting of attention via observed eye gaze is object-centred.The eyes in the face could look left or right in a head-centred frame when the face itself was oriented 90 degrees so the eyes were gazing up or down.That is,significant cueing effects to targets presented to the left or right of the screen were still found in these face orientation conditions.Subjects will automatically orient the faces upright,and the cueing effect is not significantly different from the upright condition.However,there were few researches about the reflexive mental rotation.Since the cueing effect disappeared in inverted faces,what kind of cueing effect will come out when faces rotate to obtuse angles?The present study consists of four experiments:in Experiment 1,we used shorter SOA(200ms)to exclude the possible ceiling effect;in Experiment 2,gaze-cueing effect in larger rotation angles were tested;in Experiment 3,static cues were used to examine whether static cues can eliminate reflexive mental rotation;in Experiment 4,we subjectively stress the process of face rotation to explore whether this emphasis will affected gaze-cueing effect in obtuse and inverted situations.The results were found as following:(1)Different from 3-D object and spatial perspective-taking mental rotation tasks,the rotation of faces only affected the processing of face and gaze cue,and did not directly change the effects of gaze-cue.(2)Static gaze can trigger cueing effect as well as dynamic gaze when faces rotated less than 90 degrees,but there were not reflexive mental rotation in obtuse angles in both conditions.(3)Mental rotation of faces was processed in an object-centered framework and each face was rotate from its current position to upright.Totally,the present study has shown that different from general mental rotation tasks,the face rotation only had influence on perception of gaze-cue.The degree of rotation had no direct effect on gaze-cueing effect.