Rapid saccadic response with fearful gaze cue.

Abstract

It has been shown that an averted gaze with emotional expression guides our attention toward a gazed-at location, and the effect of a gaze with fearful expression has been well-investigated. However, the findings are not consistent, and most studies used the manual response measure. Recent studies suggest that examining eye movements is more suitable to capture the early stage of the effect of threat-related stimuli on attentional process. Therefore, in the present study, we investigated the effects of static neutral and fearful gaze on overt attention orienting by examining the saccadic responses in an unselected sample of people. Our results found the gaze congruency effects for both expressions, and importantly, enhanced attention orienting by fearful gaze at a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA): participants looked faster at the fearful gaze-cued target than the neutral gaze-cued one at the 300 ms SOA. These findings provide the first evidence that fearful averted gaze elicits rapid overt attention orienting toward the target, and suggest that the information of gaze direction and emotional expression are rapidly integrated and modulate the oculomotor system.