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Among the studies on the perception of gaze vs. non-gaze stimuli, some have shown that the two types of stimuli trigger different patterns of attentional effects, while others have reported no such differences. In three experiments, we investigated the role of stimulus perceivability in spatial interference effects when the targets were gaze vs. non-gaze stimuli. We used a spatial Stroop task that required participants to make a speeded response to the direction indicated by the targets located on the left or right side of fixation. In different experiments, the targets consisted of eyes, symbols, and/or arrows. The results showed that the magnitude of the spatial congruency effect differed between the types of targets when stimulus perceivability was not controlled. However, when the perceivability of the task relevant parts was comparable between the different types of targets, similar congruency effects were found regardless of target type. These results underscore the importance of controlling for stimulus perceivability, which is closely linked to the attentional zoom required to perform a task, when making inferences about the attentional mechanisms in the processing of gaze vs. non-gaze stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative priming refers to the delayed response to a probe target that was previously a prime distractor. Memory retrieval has been proposed as one critical mechanism for the manifestation of negative priming. This perspective perpetuates that the contextual similarity between prime and probe trials should modulate memory retrieval, and therefore, affect negative priming. However, evidence for the contextual similarity effect in negative priming is mixed. The present study tested the hypothesis that attended contextual cues are more likely to be encoded into a distractor representation, and thus, are more likely to modulate the negative priming effect. By manipulating whether the contextual cues were relevant to the task demand in Section 1, and by manipulating whether cues had an abrupt or simultaneous onset, and by analysing reaction time (RT) distributions of the data in Section 2, our results demonstrated that attended cues produced the contextual similarity effect in negative priming, especially when RTs were long. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to slower responses to a target presented at a previously cued vs. uncued location. The present study investigated the role of memory retrieval in IOR by manipulating the contextual similarity between two successive targets in the target-target IOR paradigm. Successive targets were presented in either the same color (same-context condition) or different colors (different-context condition). Results of two experiments showed that IOR was greater in the same-context than the different-context condition. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that this context effect occurs with long response times (RTs), suggesting that memory retrieval, which requires time to manifest, plays an important role in IOR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]