Objects Capture Perceived Gaze Direction

Psychological Bulletin, 2007

During social interactions, people's eyes convey a wealth of information about their direction of attention and their emotional and mental states. This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of past and current research into the perception of gaze behavior and its effect on the observer. This encompasses the perception of gaze direction and its influence on perception of the other person, as well as gaze-following behavior such as joint attention, in infant, adult, and clinical populations. Particular focus is given to the gaze-cueing paradigm that has been used to investigate the mechanisms of joint attention. The contribution of this paradigm has been significant and will likely continue to advance knowledge across diverse fields within psychology and neuroscience.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008

In this chapter, we report an investigation the influence of the saliency of another person's direction of gaze on an observer's eye movements through real-world scenes. Participants' eye movements were recorded while they viewed a sequence of scene photographs that told a story. A subset of the scenes contained an actor. The actor's face was highly likely to be fixated, and when it was, the observer's next saccade was more likely to be toward the object that was the focus of the actor's gaze than in any other direction. Furthermore, when eye movement patterns did not show an immediate saccade to the focused object, observers were nonetheless more likely to fixate the focused object than a control object within close temporal proximity of fixation on the face. We conclude that during real-world scene perception, observers are sensitive to another's direction of gaze and use it to help guide their own eye movements.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2011

How information is exchanged between the cognitive mechanisms responsible for gaze perception and social attention is unclear. These systems could be independent; the "gaze cueing" effect could emerge from the activation of a general-purpose attentional mechanism that is ignorant of the social nature of the gaze cue. Alternatively, orienting to social gaze direction might be directly determined by the operation of cognitive mechanisms specifically dedicated to gaze perception. This second notion is the dominant assumption in the literature, but there is little direct support for this account. Here, we systematically manipulated observers' perception of gaze direction by implementing a gaze adaptation paradigm. Gaze cueing was reduced only in conditions where perception of specific averted gaze stimuli was impaired (Experiment 1). Adaptation to a pointing stimulus failed to impact gaze cueing (Experiment 2). Overall, these data suggest a direct link between the specific operation of gaze perception mechanisms and the consequential orienting of attention.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2008

Psychological Science, 2002

Previous research has highlighted the pivotal role played by gaze detection and interpretation in the development of social cognition. Extending work of this kind, the present research investigated the effects of eye gaze on basic aspects of the person-perception process, namely, person construal and the extraction of category-related knowledge from semantic memory. It was anticipated that gaze direction would moderate the efficiency of the mental operations through which these social-cognitive products are generated. Specifically, eye gaze was expected to influence both the speed with which targets could be categorized as men and women and the rate at which associated stereotypic material could be accessed from semantic memory. The results of two experiments supported these predictions: Targets with nondeviated (i.e., direct) eye gaze elicited facilitated categorical responses. The implications of these findings for recent treatments of person perception are considered.

Psychological bulletin, 2007

Cognitive Develop, 1999

This study challenges the consensus view that children can judge what someone is looking at from infancy. In the first experiment 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children were asked to judge what a person in a drawing was looking at and which of two people was “looking at” them. Only 6% of 2-year-olds and young 3-year-olds passed both gaze-direction tasks, but over 70% passed an analogous point-direction task. Most older 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds passed all three tasks. Experiment 2 compared children's ability to judge what the experimenter was looking at with performance on the picture tasks. Three-year-olds performed significantly worse than 4-year-olds on the real life and picture gaze tasks. Performances on the two types of gaze task were highly correlated. Experiment 3 included stimuli with the additional cue of head-direction. Even the younger children performed well on these stimuli. These results suggest that, regardless of task format, children cannot judge what someone is looking at from eye-direction alone until the age of 3 years. Weaknesses in the evidence supporting the consensus view are highlighted and discussed.

Social Neuroscience, 2008

2011