Special Issue "Reflexive Shifts in Visual Attention"

Interest in Reflexive Attentional Shift has intensified in recent years because the cueing of visual attention is commonly used as a developmental measure of perspective-taking ability and the ability to infer someone else's mental state. Reflexive Attentional Shift occurs when attention is oriented by the onset of a stimulus at a specific location (Posner, 1980). Attention can also be biased towards where another person (the Other) is looking and this can cause errors or slower responding when reporting what we see, if this is different from what the Other sees.

This Special Issue is inspired by the fact that the results of recent research are consistently similar, but continued to be interpreted either considering the perceptual characteristics of the Other (non-mentalizing position) or the social characteristic of the Other (mentalizing or Altercentric intrusion position).

The current Special Issue is open to submissions of previously unpublished experimental, prospective, extended articles and review papers on the following and related topics:

Theory of mind
Spontaneous Perspective taken
Altercentric intrusion
Directional attentional cues
Dot perspective task