Visual mental imagery of nonpredictive central social cues triggers automatic attentional orienting

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105968

PSYCH OpenIR

	Visual mental imagery of nonpredictive central social cues triggers automatic attentional orienting
	Zhang, Shujia 1,2; Wang, Li 1,2; Jiang, Yi 1,2
通讯作者	Wang, Li(wangli@psych.ac.cn)
摘要	Previous research has demonstrated that social cues (e.g., eye gaze, walking direction of biological motion) can automatically guide people's focus of attention, a well-known phenomenon called social attention. The current research shows that voluntarily generated social cues via visual mental imagery, without being physically presented, can produce robust attentional orienting similar to the classic social attentional orienting effect. Combining a visual imagery task with a dot-probe task, we found that imagining a non-predictive gaze cue could orient attention towards the gazed-at hemifield. Such attentional effect persisted even when the imagery gaze cue was counter-predictive of the target hemifield, and could be generalized to biological motion cue. Besides, this effect could not be simply attributed to low-level motion signal embedded in gaze cues. More importantly, an eye-tracking experiment carefully monitoring potential eye movements demonstrated the imagery-induced attentional orienting effect induced by social cues, but not by non-social cues (i.e., arrows), suggesting that such effect is specialized to visual imagery of social cues. These findings accentuate the demarcation between social and non-social attentional orienting, and may take a preliminary step in conceptualizing voluntary visual imagery as a form of internally directed attention.
关键词	Social attentional orienting Visual mental imagery Eye gaze Biological motion Arrow
	2025
语种	英语
DOI	10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105968
发表期刊	COGNITION
ISSN	0010-0277
卷号	254 页码:11
收录类别	SCI
资助项目	STI2030-Major Projects[2021ZD0203800] ; STI2030-Major Projects[2022ZD0205100] ; National Natural Science Foundation of China[32430043] ; National Natural Science Foundation of China[32371106] ; Interdisciplinary Innovation Team of the Chinese Academy of Sciences[JCTD-2021-06] ; Key Research and Development Program of Guangdong, China[2023B0303010004] ; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
出版者	ELSEVIER
WOS关键词	WORKING-MEMORY ; EYE GAZE ; COUNTERPREDICTIVE GAZE ; VISUOSPATIAL ATTENTION ; BIOLOGICAL MOTION ; NEURAL MECHANISMS ; PERCEPTION ; REPRESENTATIONS ; GUIDANCE ; RETURN
WOS研究方向	Psychology
WOS类目	Psychology, Experimental
WOS记录号	WOS:001330935300001
资助机构	STI2030-Major Projects ; National Natural Science Foundation of China ; Interdisciplinary Innovation Team of the Chinese Academy of Sciences ; Key Research and Development Program of Guangdong, China ; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
引用统计
文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	https://ir.psych.ac.cn/handle/311026/49308
通讯作者	Wang, Li
作者单位	1.Chinese Acad Sci, Inst Psychol, State Key Lab Brain & Cognit Sci, Beijing, Peoples R China 2.Univ Chinese Acad Sci, Dept Psychol, Beijing, Peoples R China
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Zhang, Shujia,Wang, Li,Jiang, Yi. Visual mental imagery of nonpredictive central social cues triggers automatic attentional orienting[J]. COGNITION,2025,254:11.
APA	Zhang, Shujia,Wang, Li,&Jiang, Yi.(2025).Visual mental imagery of nonpredictive central social cues triggers automatic attentional orienting.COGNITION,254,11.
MLA	Zhang, Shujia,et al."Visual mental imagery of nonpredictive central social cues triggers automatic attentional orienting".COGNITION 254(2025):11.