The processing of gaze cues plays an important role in social interactions, and mutual gaze in particular is relevant for natural as well as video-mediated communications. Mutual gaze occurs when an observer looks at or in the direction of the eyes of another person. The authors chose the metaphor of a cone of gaze to characterize this range of gaze directions that constitutes "looking at" another person. In 4 experiments using either a real person or a virtual head, the authors investigated the influences of observer distance, head orientation, visibility of the eyes, and the presence of a 2nd head on the perceived direction and width of the gaze cone. The direction of the gaze cone was largely affected by all experimental manipulations, whereas its angular width remained comparatively stable.
The motions of objects in the environment reflect underlying dynamical constraints and regularities. The conditions under which people are sensitive to natural dynamics are considered. In particular, the article considers what determines whether observers can distinguish canonical and anomalous dynamics when viewing ongoing events. The extent to which such perceptual appreciations are integrated with and influence common-sense reasoning about mechanical events is examined. It is concluded that animation evokes accurate dynamical intuitions when there is only 1 dimension of information that is of dynamical relevance. This advantage is lost when the observed motion reflects higher dimension dynamics or when the kinematic information is removed or degraded.
Paper-and-pencil tasks showed that many university students believed that when laterally approaching a mirror, they would see a reflection in the mirror before it was geometrically possible. Participants failed to adequately factor in the observer's location in the room. However, when asked about the behavior of a ray of light, participants knew about the law of reflection. No differences between psychology and physics students were detected, suggesting that the phenomenon is widespread and refractory to training. The findings were replicated with observers making judgments about image locations in a real room using a pretend mirror. Possible heuristics about mirror reflection that might explain the data are discussed. Naive optics is a promising venue to further knowledge of how observers understand basic laws of physics.
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