Qian Qian, Jingsong Li, Zhenhong Shang, Yong Feng, Feng Wang; Sequence effects of symbolic cueing by gaze and arrow cues. Journal of Vision 2016;16(12):899. doi: 10.1167/16.12.899.
Symbolic cueing paradigm has been widely used to investigate the attention orienting induced by centrally-presented gaze or arrow cues. Previous studies have found a sequence effect in this paradigm when arrows are used as central cues and simple detection tasks are included. The sequence effect has been explained as either the automatic memory retrieval of previous trial types or the strategy adjustment of participants depending on whether the previous cue correctly or wrongly shifts their attention. The present study investigated the universality of the sequence effect with different cues and different tasks. In experiment 1, sequence effects were tested with a central uninformative gaze cue and a discrimination task. The use of discrimination task would result in alternated/repeated target identities and response keys between consecutive trials. Experiment 2 was aimed to compare the sequence effects induced by gaze and arrow cues. Specifically, uninformative gaze and arrow cues were randomly mixed during the experimental trials to form four kinds of cue sequence conditions between consecutive trials: gaze-gaze sequence, gaze-arrow sequence, arrow-gaze sequence, and arrow-arrow sequence. It was found that sequence effects can be induced by central gaze cues and are not influenced by the repetition and switch of target identities (along with response keys). In addition, the sequence effect can even generalize across different cue types (from gaze to arrow, or from arrow to gaze). The results suggest that sequential processing is a common mechanism in attention orienting systems, and support the automatic retrieval hypothesis more than the strategy adjustment account.