The Impact of Sociality of Objects on Covert Attention with Social Cues in Virtual Reality

The study aimed to investigate the allocation of covert attention in a social context in virtual reality (VR) by manipulating the type of social cues and the sociality of the object on which the target appeared; in a modified Posner cueing task, a virtual avatar pointed to the left or right using its hand or head as a cue, and the target appeared on a social (another avatar) or nonsocial object on either side of the avatar according to the cue validity. To use the cueing effect as the dependent variable, the RTs were calculated as the Invalid condition minus the Valid condition. The results showed no significant main effect of cue type, indicating that there was no difference in the presentation of cues between hands and heads in VR. Conversely, a significant main effect of object type was observed. Post-hoc tests revealed that the cueing effect was significantly stronger for nonsocial objects than social objects. These results suggest that the sociality of objects can significantly impact the allocation of covert attention in social contexts.