Our attention is particularly driven toward faces, especially the eyes, and there is much debate over the factors that modulate this social attentional orienting. Most of the previous research has presented faces in isolation, and we tried to address this shortcoming by measuring people’s eye movements whilst they observe more naturalistic and varied social interactions. Participants’ eye movements were monitored whilst they watched three different types of social interactions (monologue, manual activity, active attentional misdirection), which were either accompanied by the corresponding audio as speech or by silence. Our results showed that (1) participants spent more time looking at the face when the person was giving a monologue, than when he/she was carrying out manual activities, and in the latter case they spent more time fixating on the person’s hands. (2) Hearing speech significantly increases the amount of time participants spent looking at the face (this effect was relatively small), although this was not accounted for by any increase in mouth-oriented gaze. (3) Participants spent significantly more time fixating on the face when direct eye contact was established, and this drive to establish eye contact was significantly stronger in the manual activities than during the monologue. These results highlight people’s strategic top-down control over when they attend to faces and the eyes, and support the view that we use our eyes to signal non-verbal information.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.3758/s13414-018-1588-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

MSc (Gold.) is a PhD student within the CINE (Cognition in Naturalistic Environments) Lab, in the Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London. Under the supervision of Dr. Tim Smith and Prof. Fred Dick he studies the influence of sound on when and where vision orients in complex scenes (including film and naturalistic environments), and how this affects perception and memory. He is experienced in quantifying active vision with eye-tracking, utilizing psychophysical and behavioral measures to address how sound (music, dialogue, sound-effects) can orient attention through time. Tim J. Smith Tim J. Smith BSc. Hons, PhD. (Edin.) is a Reader/Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London. He is the head of the CINE (Cognition in Naturalistic Environments) Lab which studies audiovisual attention, perception and memory in real-world and mediated environments (including Film, TV and VR) as well as the impacts of such media on social and cognitive development. He is an expert in active vision and eye tracking and applies empirical Cognitive Psychology methods to questions of Film Cognition publishing his work on the subject in both Psychology and Film journals. AbstractFrom the earliest films to the blockbusters of today, film has rarely been silent. Live musical accompaniment of silent movies progressed into the synchronized sound of 'talkies' and today film sound is a highly developed craft in which sound-designers believe they have the power to represent and accentuate aspects of the scene, focusing the viewer's attention to specific events and conveying emotion (e.g. Bordwell & Thompson, 2013;Chion, 1994;Murch, 2001). This chapter will attempt to empirically validate some of these beliefs by exploring the separate and integrated influence of each of the primary auditory components of a film's sound design (musical score, dialogue and sound effects; known as "sound stems") on viewer behavior, specifically observing the role of sound in guiding a viewer's gaze through a film. This chapter will approach these issues from the perspective of experimental cognitive psychology. For a review of sound design practice see Sonnenschein, (2001); for a review of the psychological impacts of music and sound see Cohen (2014) and for reviews of film theory on classic and modern sound design see Gorbman (1980) and Donnelly (2009), respectively. This chapter considers the influence of sound design in two "found" experimental case studies in which filmmakers claim to have manipulated viewer behavior through sound design. Firstly, a highly dynamic and edited scene from How to Train Your Dragon (DeBlois & Sanders 2010) was viewed with the three sound stems independently (dialogue, sound effects, music and a silent condition), the attentional synchrony and affective responses between the sound conditions will be compared. Secondly, gaze behavior during the famous single long opening shot from The Conversation (Coppola 1974) compared the sound influences (the presence...

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Music has been shown to entrain movement. One of the body’s most frequent movements, saccades, are arguably subject to a timer that may also be susceptible to musical entrainment. We developed a continuous and highly-controlled visual search task and varied the timing of the search target presentation, it was either gaze-contingent, tap-contingent, or visually-timed. We found: (1) explicit control of saccadic timing is limited to gross duration variations and imprecisely synchronized; (2) saccadic timing does not implicitly entrain to musical beats, even when closely aligned in phase; (3) eye movements predict visual onsets produced by motor-movements (finger-taps) and externally-timed sequences, beginning fixation prior to visual onset; (4) eye movement timing can be rhythmic, synchronizing to both motor-produced and externally timed visual sequences; each unaffected by musical beats. These results provide evidence that saccadic timing is sensitive to the temporal demands of visual tasks and impervious to influence from musical beats.

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