Attentional differences between gaze and arrows processing: where vs what are eyes looking at [Review]

The submitted study attempted to explain the differential congruency effects of gaze and arrow. The authors divided the participants into a direction and a color group, and expected a reversed congruency effect of gaze and a standard congruency effect of arrows when participants were required to judge the direction. However, they expected both a standard congruency when participants had to judge the color of the frame being directed towards. The authors had summarized several relevant studies, and proposed their two working hypothesis (absence of a specific object to look at, or following the focus of interest of a social partner). The results replicated their previous studies and revealed something new. I appreciate the authors’ effort to preregister their study before data collection and conduct a Bayesian analysis to support their results. But I have some major concerns about the hypothesis and the experiment design that prevent me from accepting this version of manuscript as published. In the introduction, the first hypothesis the authors proposed is the eye contact, but it has been abandoned later by a previous study showing the reversed congruency effect disappeared when the eye color was judged. In the second hypothesis, gaze direction is seen as a sign that signals the intention of a social partner by his or her focus of interest. But it seems a little difficult to tell the exact differences between these two hypotheses. Both assumed the participants attend the eye regions to decode the intention under the gaze direction. Is this process another type of eye contact (e.g., an active contact)? A further clarification about the second hypothesis is needed. Also, if the social intention of the gaze direction elicits the reversed congruency effect, it is read out from the gaze direction. Either in the task which required to judge where the eyes look at, or in the task which required to judge the color of the object they looked at, participants should attend the eye regions and discriminate the gaze direction as an initial step. The two tasks thus do not apparently differ with each other in nature. So it is not surprising a similar reversed congruency effect was found. By contrast, in Narganes-Pineda et al (2022) when judging the color of the eyes, the gaze direction is completely orthogonal to the task goal. Some additional discussions about the task requirement are necessary in the Discussion section. Furthermore, another factor may somewhat reduce this reversed congruency effect and made it marginally significant in statistic. In the experiment, the left and right border of the bicolor frame, where the gaze or arrows were displayed, are not equal in distance from the eyes located at the left or right side. The border incongruent with the gaze direction is always farther away than the border that is congruent. For instance, the eyes located in the right side looked at the right side of border in congruent trials, but looked at the left border in incongruent trials. Since RT in the incongruent trials probably increased when the border was farther from the eye, this may reduce the reversed congruency effect and amplify the congruency effect. I believe that the inversed congruency effect may not be caused by an empty space in which no specific objects are searched for. But the current design which added a bicolor frame is not a straightforward and optimal solution to test a standard congruency effect (as it will amplify this effect). This may not be a severe problem after an inversed congruency effect have been obtained, however, if the congruency effect was expected as the authors hypothesized, this is not that ideal. Probably, to put a real object, e.g., a ball or simply a colored square, just at the left or right side of the eyes with equal distance? I would like to see the authors conduct a new stricter experiment, or at least discuss about the limitation in their manuscript. Minor L111, 118, the size of the stimuli, and their distance from the fixation should be provided in a unit of visual degree. For gaze, in incongruent condition, there were faster RT but higher errors compared with congruent condition. Is there a speed-accuracy trade-off in this inversed congruency effect?