Humans as social beings rely on information provided by conspecifics. One important signal in social communication is eye gaze. The current study (n = 93) sought to replicate and extend previous findings of attentional guidance by eye gaze in complex everyday scenes. In line with previous studies, longer, more and earlier fixations for objects cued by gaze compared to objects that were not cued were observed in free viewing conditions. To investigate how robust this prioritization is against top-down modulation, half of the participants received a memory task that required scanning the whole scene instead of exclusively focusing on cued objects. Interestingly, similar gaze cueing effects occurred in this group. Moreover, the human beings depicted in the scene received a large amount of attention, especially during early phases of visual attention, even though they were irrelevant to the current task. These results indicate that the mere presence of other human beings, as well as their gaze orientation, have a strong impact on attentional exploration. Data and analysis scripts are available at https://osf.io/jk9s4.

Humans often show reduced social attention in real situations, a finding rarely replicated in controlled laboratory studies. Virtual reality is supposed to allow for ecologically valid and at the same time highly controlled experiments. This study aimed to provide initial insights into the reliability and validity of using spherical videos viewed via a head-mounted display (HMD) to assess social attention. We chose five public places in the city of Würzburg and measured eye movements of 44 participants for 30 s at each location twice: Once in a real environment with mobile eye-tracking glasses and once in a virtual environment playing a spherical video of the location in an HMD with an integrated eye tracker. As hypothesized, participants demonstrated reduced social attention with less exploration of passengers in the real environment as compared to the virtual one. This is in line with earlier studies showing social avoidance in interactive situations. Furthermore, we only observed consistent gaze proportions on passengers across locations in virtual environments. These findings highlight that the potential for social interactions and an adherence to social norms are essential modulators of viewing behavior in social situations and cannot be easily simulated in laboratory contexts. However, spherical videos might be helpful for supplementing the range of methods in social cognition research and other fields. Data and analysis scripts are available at https://osf.io/hktdu/.

Humans often show reduced social attention in real situations, a finding rarely replicated in controlled laboratory studies. Virtual reality is supposed to allow for ecologically valid and at the same time highly controlled experiments. This study aimed to provide initial insights into the reliability and validity of using spherical videos viewed via a head-mounted display (HMD) to assess social attention. We chose five public places in the city of Würzburg and measured eye movements of 44 participants for 30 seconds at each location twice: Once in a real environment with mobile eye tracking glasses and once in a virtual environment playing a spherical video of the location in an HMD with an integrated eye tracker. As hypothesized,participants demonstrated reduced social attention with less fixations on passengers in the real environment as compared to the virtual one. This is in line with earlier studies showing social avoidance in interactive situations. Furthermore, we observed more consistent fixation patterns in virtual environments. These findings highlight that the potential for social interactions and an adherence to social norms are essential modulators of viewing behavior in social situations and cannot be easily simulated in laboratory contexts. However, spherical videos might be helpful for supplementing the range of methods in social cognition research and other fields. Data and analysis scripts are available at https://osf.io/hktdu/.