Effective processing of masked eye gazes requires volitional control

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the validity effect produced by gaze cues should be ascribed solely to reflexive, bottom-up mechanisms or to volitional, top-down mechanisms. We find, in a central cueing paradigm, that masked eye gaze cues can indeed produce a validity effect; however, the efficacy of these masked gaze cues is sharply constrained by experimental context. Specifically, masked gaze cues only produced a validity effect when they appeared in the context of unmasked (clearly visible) and predictive gaze cues. In contrast, unmasked gaze cues produced reliable validity effects independent of experimental context, including Experiment 4 wherein 80% of the cues were invalid (i.e. counter-predictive). Collectively, these results suggest that the effective processing of masked gaze cues requires volitional control, whereas the processing of unmasked gaze cues benefits from both reflexive and top-down mechanisms.