Although gaze direction is known to convey spatial information, the properties of its spatial coding remain largely unexplored. The present study investigated the distinct natures of spatial codes for each axis of gaze direction. To achieve this, the ...
Although gaze direction is known to convey spatial information, the properties of its spatial coding remain largely unexplored. The present study investigated the distinct natures of spatial codes for each axis of gaze direction. To achieve this, the cross-task congruency sequence effect (CSE) and the time courses of different Simon effects were examined. Participants performed horizontal and vertical Simon tasks alternatively in a trial-by-trial manner, utilizing gaze direction and another mode of spatial information, respectively. In Experiment 1, horizontal and vertical gaze-based Simon tasks were used to investigate whether spatial codes for gaze direction differ based on the axis. Subsequent experiments examined whether horizontal and vertical gaze directions shared spatial codes with physical location (Experiment 2A and 2B), arrows (Experiment 3), and location words (Experiment 4A and 4B). The findings demonstrated that horizontal and vertical gaze directions exclusively shared spatial codes with different modes of spatial information. For the horizontal gaze-based Simon task, a cross-task CSE was found with the vertical arrow-based Simon task, but not with either the vertical gaze-based or vertical word-based Simon tasks. A unidirectional CSE was found from the vertical location-based Simon effect to the horizontal gaze-based Simon effect. In contrast, for the vertical gaze-based Simon task, a cross-task CSE was found only with the vertical word-based Simon task. Additionally, the gaze-based Simon effects and other modes of Simon effects revealed different patterns of their time courses. Different shapes of delta functions reflected differences in the speed of activation and dissipation of spatial codes during the early stages of response processing, but did not indicate qualitative differences in their spatial codes. These results suggest that horizontal and vertical gaze directions encode spatial information through different attributes.