Does agency cueing of geometric shapes affect their attentional cueing effects? Investigating the social component of endogenous attentional orienting.

Recent neuroimaging studies have suggested common cognitive processes to be involved in (1) tasks tapping into 'low-level' attentional (re)orienting and (2) tasks requiring social-cognitive skills, based on substantial overlap in neural activation. In addition to this suggestion of common underlying processes, some researchers even theorized these basic spatial-attentional processes to be the building blocks of social cognition, more specifically of 'mind-reading' abilities generally referred to as Theory of Mind. We argue that attentional cueing effects, which are traditionally held to reflect basic spatial-attentional processes, at least partly reflect some degree of social contract implied by the communicative (and hence social) nature of the central cue that predicts where attention should be focused on. Consequently, we posit that making the socialagentive nature of the cues more salient (e.g., making them goal-directed agents) will result in stronger attention effects. To study this, we plan to conduct an adapted version of Posner's endogenous cueing task using a 2 (cue validity) x 2 (high versus low agency) factorial within-subjects design. The agency level of the central cues is primed using animations just before the attention task. Results will be presented and discussed during the conference.