Abstract
Other people’s eye gaze is a cue for observers about where to direct attention. Research suggests that gaze cues induce rapid and automatic attentional shifts (Ristic et al., 2007, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review). Research also indicates that dogs respond to human gaze cues (e.g. Duranten et al., 2018, Royal Society Open Science). Do humans orient attention based on dog gaze cues? We used a gaze cueing paradigm with photorealistic and emoji versions of human and dog faces. On each trial, a face appeared, shifted gaze left or right, and after a 100-, 200-, or 400-millisecond stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), a target appeared on the left or the right. The gaze cue was non-predictive, being valid on 50% of the trials. Participants (N = 72) responded based on target location. With mean response time (RT) as the dependent variable, there was a statistically significant validity effect that was qualified by several significant interactions, including a four-way interaction that included SOA, whether the picture was an emoji or not, and whether the face was human or dog. A cueing effect (faster RT for valid than invalid trials) was obtained with each face type at each SOA. For the dog face and human emoji, the cueing effects were 24ms and 29ms (respectively) at the 100ms SOA, but declined to 5ms and 12ms (respectively) at the 400ms SOA. The cueing effect for the human face and dog emoji were less affected by SOA. The human face cueing effect was 13ms at the 100ms SOA, and about 8ms for longer SOAs. The dog emoji cueing effect was 7–8ms for each SOA. While this specific pattern of data may be due to the particular faces we used, the results nonetheless demonstrate that humans may shift attention based on dog gaze cues.