Social orienting: Reflexive versus voluntary control

Many studies have shown that the direction of gaze of a face covertly facilitates the response to a target presented in the matching direction. In this study we seek to determine whether there exist separate reflexive and voluntary forms of such covert social orienting and how they interact with each other. We measured the effect of the predictive value of a gaze cue on manual choice reaction times. When the predictive value of the gaze cue was zero, a facilitatory cueing effect was still observed which peaked at a cue onset to target onset delay (CTD) of 150 ms and largely diminished beyond a CTD of 500 ms. When the gaze cue was 100% predictive of the future location of the target, at CTDs greater than 200, the predictive cue resulted in a significantly greater facilitation of response than occurred with a non-predictive cue. These results suggest that given enough time (about 200 ms), the social cue is interpreted and a willful or voluntary spatially-specific social cueing effect occurs. In addition, we found that a predictive cue resulted in a significant slowing of the observer’s responses up to a CTD of 200 ms. These findings show that, similar to non-social spatial orienting, there appear to be two forms of social orienting including a reflexive component and voluntary component. We suggest a model of social orienting in which the voluntary social orienting system modulates tonic inhibition of the reflexive social orienting system.