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Poor vigilance affects attentional orienting triggered by central uninformative gaze and arrow cues

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Abstract

Behaviour and neuroimaging studies have shown that poor vigilance (PV) due to sleep deprivation (SD) negatively affects exogenously cued selective attention. In the current study, we assessed the impact of PV due to both partial SD and night-time hours on reflexive attentional orienting triggered by central un-informative eye-gaze and arrow cues. Subjective mood and interference performance in emotional Stroop task were also investigated. Twenty healthy participants performed spatial cueing tasks using central directional arrow and eye-gaze as a cue to orient attention. The target was a word written in different coloured inks. The participant’s task was to identify the colour of the ink while ignoring the semantic content of the word (with negative or neutral emotional valence). The experiment took place on 2 days. On the first day, each participant performed a 10-min training session of the spatial cueing task. On the second day, half of participants performed the task once at 4:30 p.m. (BSL) and once at 6:30 a.m. (PV), whereas the other half performed the task in the reversed order. Results showed that mean reaction times on the spatial cueing tasks were worsened by PV, although gaze paradigm was more resistant to this effect as compared to the arrow paradigm. Moreover, PV negatively affects attentional orienting triggered by both central un-informative gaze and arrow cues. Finally, prolonged wakefulness affects self-reported mood but does not influence interference control in emotional Stroop task.

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Notes

  1. The sample of the study was mainly composed by female participants due to a previous work showing that females show stronger gaze cueing effects (Bayliss et al. 2005) and large gender differences in emotion processing (e.g., Cahill 2006; Kemp et al. 2004), which could potentially introduce additional variance into our data. However, in future studies, the assessment of a sample of male participants would be useful.

  2. Consistent with the majority of the studies investigating gaze cueing effect, in the present study the cues were presented until the behavioural response (Dalmaso et al. 2013; Guzzon et al. 2010; Lachat et al. 2012; Marotta et al. 2014; Schulz et al. 2013). However, studies about the effect of the cue duration on eye-gaze cueing effects have previously yielded inconclusive results. While one study reported a rapid gaze cueing effect only when the cue overlapped in time with the target (Green et al. 2013), other study showed significant cueing effect for both gaze cues that overlapped in time with the target and for gaze cues that were removed prior to target presentation (Gayzur et al. 2013). Further research will be necessary to shed light upon this issue.

  3. When participants had to attend before PV and then BSL sessions, they followed the same procedure of continuous wakefulness in the first session, while the BSL session was scheduled about 3 days after the PV session.

  4. In this study, facilitation effects did not revert to an inhibition of return (IOR) effect even at the 850 ms SOA. With no-predictive gaze cues, reliable inhibition effects have been previously observed only at a very long SOA of 2400 ms (Frischen and Tipper 2004; Frischen et al. 2007a, b; Marotta et al. 2013b), while with no-predictive arrow cues, IOR effects have never been reported.

  5. The greater resistance of eye-gaze performances to the deleterious effects of low arousal could alternatively be attributed to the more arousing perceptual proprieties of eye-gaze stimuli. Evidences suggest that the differences in the effects of eye-gaze and arrow cues are largely independent from the stimulus parameters such as stimulus size and contrast (Hermens and Walker 2010). However, the impact of the different stimulus parameters has never been directly compared in sleep-deprived participants. Further research will be necessary to shed light upon this issue.

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Marotta, A., Martella, D., Maccari, L. et al. Poor vigilance affects attentional orienting triggered by central uninformative gaze and arrow cues. Cogn Process 15, 503–513 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-014-0614-4

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