Directional cueing explains search time advantage for interacting dyads

An increasing number of studies have investigated the visual perception of social interactions. A commonly used paradigm in this research is the comparison of facing and non-facing dyads in visual search, where facing dyads are found faster than non-facing dyads. This has commonly been interpreted as evidence of a specialized system for social interaction processing. In a series of experiments (N= 40 each), we use this same paradigm to first replicate previous findings and then show that similar effects can be found when presenting non-social pairs of arrows. We then exclude the possibility of different causes producing these similar results by using combined face-arrow pairs, which again produced a response time advantage for pairs that directionally cue each other. These findings indicate that the search advantage found for facing dyads is a product of the directional cues present within these arrangements …