On the Determination of Eye Gaze and Arrow Direction: Automaticity Reconsidered

It is a widely held view that the determination of eye gaze direction is "automatic" in various senses (e.g., innate; informationally encapsulated; triggered without intent). The determination of arrow direction is also held to be automatic (following a certain amount of learning) despite not being innate. The present experiments evaluate the automaticity assumption of both eyes and arrows in terms of an interference criterion. The results of 10 experiments support the inference that explicit judgements of eye gaze direction, when participants respond with a lateralized key press, are (a) neither automatic in the strong sense (they are interfered with by an uninformative, incongruent arrow in the display) and (b) nor are they are automatic in a weaker sense (uninformative, incongruent arrows interfere more strongly with the determination of eye gaze direction than uninformative, incongruent eyes interfere with the arrow direction task). However, the determination of arrow direction is also not strongly automatic, given that it is interfered with by irrelevant eyes. At least with respect to an interference criterion, the determination of eye gaze direction appears less prepotent than the determination of arrow direction, which itself is only weakly automatic.