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Following our preregistered design and hypotheses, we found interesting results in the second experiment. Thus, we have decided to conduct a third experiment following the simpler design used by Marotta et al. (2018), with the addition of a peripheral visual cue 100 ms before the target onset and, in an alternative block, an alert sound 450 ms before the target onset.

Social attention is considered to be the precursor of Social Cognition and Theory of Mind, which are fundamental for understanding social events and interact with other people. The observations regarding the attentional orientation effect between social (i.e., gaze) and non-social (i.e., arrows) stimuli have pointed out similar quantitative results but some differences have come out from a qualitative point of view. This study aims to 1) investigate physiological qualities in social cueing tasks through heart rate variability and 2) understand whether individuals with different HRV at baseline perform better in tasks with social stimuli. Sixty undergraduate students will be recruited to participate in two spatial orientation tasks: the first uses a classical Posner paradigm, the second an adaptation of the Posner paradigm employing the double rectangle model. Participants will be asked to fill the Reading the Mind in the Eyes questionnaire and the Autism Spectrum Quotient to assess social cognition skills. Heart rate variability (HRV) at rest (baseline) and during experimental procedures will be recorded. As a complement to the traditional analyses (i.e., reaction times mean and accuracy rate), the data will be modeled through the Drift Diffusion Model (DDM) in order to analyze the performance in more detail. It is expected that participants with higher HRV at baseline will present a better social cognition, therefore a better performance on cueing tasks with social stimuli.

A previous study (Marotta et al., 2014) showed that individuals with ADHD have a selective impairment in orienting attention in response to eye-gaze direction. However, they preserved attentional orienting in response to non-social stimuli (arrow and peripheral cues). Moreover, in a later study (Marotta et al., 2017), we observed that ADHD individuals were also less sensitive than matched controls to the eye-gaze direction when it was used as a distracting stimulus in a Stroop-like task. No difference between ADHD and controls was observed when arrows were used as distracting stimuli. These findings may suggest that only the social-specific components elicited by eye-gaze but not the domain-general directional component of the spatial congruency effect could be impaired by ADHD symptomatology. Consistent with a preserved domain-general component of the spatial congruency effect, Polner (2015) showed no association between ADHD-like traits and congruency effect when no-social directional stimuli such arrows were used as targets in a spatial interference task (e.g. spatial Stroop/Simon like task). Here, we will examine, for the first time, the relationship between the RCE and ADHD-like traits [measured by means of the Barkley Adult ADHD Rating Scale-IV (Barkley, 2011) and Adult ADHD Self-Report Screening Scale for DSM-5 (Ustun et al., 2017)] in a large sample of healthy adults. The SCE elicited by arrows will also be investigated. Suppose only the social-specific components elicited by eye-gaze but not the domain-general component of the SCE is impaired by ADHD. In that case, a negative correlation should be observed only between ADHD-like traits and the RCE elicited by eye-gaze, but not between ADHD traits and the SCE elicited by arrows.