Previous research on covert orienting to the periphery suggested that early profound deaf adults were less susceptible to uninformative gaze cues, though were equally or more affected by non-social arrow cues. The aim of the present work was to investigate whether spontaneous eye movement behaviour helps explain the reduced impact of the social cue in deaf adults. We tracked the gaze of 25 early profound deaf and 25 age-matched hearing observers performing a peripheral discrimination task with uninformative central cues (gaze vs. arrow), stimulus-onset asynchrony (250 vs. 750 ms) and cue-validity (valid vs. invalid) as within-subject factors. In both groups, the cue-effect on RT was comparable for the two cues, although deaf observers responded significantly slower than hearing controls. While deaf and hearing observers eye movement pattern looked similar when the cue was presented in isolation, deaf participants made significantly eye movements than hearing controls once the discrimination target appeared. Notably, further analysis of eye movements in the deaf group revealed that independent of cue-type, cue-validity affected saccade landing position, while latency was not modulated by these factors. Saccade landing position was also strongly related to the magnitude of the validity effect on RT, such that the greater the difference in saccade landing position between invalid and valid trials, the greater the difference in manual RT between invalid and valid trials. This work suggests that the contribution of overt selection in central cueing of attention is more prominent in deaf adults and helps determine the manual performance, irrespective of cue-type.

先前对外围隐蔽定向的研究表明，早期重度聋的成年人不太容易受到无信息的凝视线索的影响，尽管同样或更多地受到非社会箭头线索的影响。目前工作的目的是调查自发的眼球运动行为是否有助于解释社会线索对聋哑成年人的影响减弱。我们跟踪了 25 名早期重度聋人和 25 名年龄匹配的听力观察者的凝视，这些观察者使用无信息的中央线索（注视与箭头）、刺激开始异步（250 对 750 毫秒）和线索有效性（有效对. 无效）作为被试内因素。在两组中，两种线索对 RT 的线索效果相当，尽管聋人观察者的反应明显慢于听力对照组。虽然当单独呈现提示时，聋人和听力观察者的眼球运动模式看起来相似，但一旦歧视目标出现，聋人参与者的眼球运动就会比听力对照组显着。值得注意的是，对聋人组眼球运动的进一步分析表明，与提示类型无关，提示有效性影响跳视着陆位置，而潜伏期不受这些因素的调节。跳视着陆位置也与对 RT 的有效性影响的大小密切相关，因此无效和有效试验之间的跳视着陆位置差异越大，无效和有效试验之间手动 RT 的差异越大。