Are Eyes Windows to a Deceiver's Soul? Children's Use of Another's Eye Gaze Cues in a Deceptive Situation.

Abstract

Three experiments examined 3-to 5-year-olds' use of eye gaze cues to infer truth in a deceptive situation. Children watched a video of an actor who hid a toy in 1 of 3 cups. In Experiments 1 and 2, the actor claimed ignorance about the toy's location but looked toward 1 of the cups, without (Experiment 1) and with (Experiment 2) head movement. In Experiment 3, the actor provided contradictory verbal and eye gaze clues about the location of the toy. Four-and 5-year-olds correctly used the actor's gaze cues to locate the toy, whereas 3-year-olds failed to do so. Results suggest that by 4 years of age, children begin to understand that eye gaze cues displayed by a deceiver can be informative about the true state of affairs.For humans and other animals, eyes not only function to see things but also serve as stimuli to be seen by others. In the animal world, eyes serve important inter-and intraspecies communicative functions. Specifically, eye gaze provides information about aggression, dominance, submission, attention, and affiliation (Argyle & Cook, 1976;Hare, Brown, Williamson, & Tomasello, 2002;Povinelli & Eddy, 1997;Rutter, 1984). Human use of eye gaze information includes, but also goes beyond, the above functions. Foremost among humanspecific functions is the transmission of information about mental states and activities, information we interpret routinely (Argyle & Cook, 1976;Rutter, 1984). Nevertheless, this may not be true of everyone: It has been suggested that insensitivity to eye gaze is related to impairments in social and cognitive functioning, as in autism and Asperger syndrome (BaronCohen, Campbell, Karmiloff-Smith, Grant, & Walker, 1995;Baron-Cohen, Joliffe, Mortimore, & Robertson, 1997;Leekam, Baron-Cohen, Perrett, Milders, & Brown, 1997;Leekam, Lopez, & Moore, 2000;Philips, Baron-Cohen, & Rutter, 1992).There has been extensive research on adult perception of eye direction and use of eye gaze information. Research consistently indicates that adults are extremely sensitive to eye contact and direction of eye gaze, with accuracy of detecting eye contact and direction near the level of visual acuity (Cline, 1967;Gibson & Pick, 1963; Symons, Lee, Cedrone, & Nishimura, in press). Furthermore, evidence shows that adults readily make attributions about personality traits, such as competence and intelligence, and about physical attraction on the basis of eye gaze patterns (see Kleinke, 1986, for a review). Eye gaze cues are also used by adults to make inferences about others' cognitive activity, including their focus of attention, intention, desire, Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kang Lee, Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0109. E-mail: kang@psy.ucsd.edu. NIH Public Access NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscriptand knowledge about the current state of affairs (Argyle & Cook, 1976;Baron-Cohen et al., 1997;Kleinke, 1986).Research investigating the early development of children's sensitiv...

Tell-tale eyes: Children's attribution of gaze aversion as a lying cue.

“…Like many studies investigating children's use of nonverbal cues (e.g., Freire et al, 2004;Morency & Krauss, 1982;Rotenberg et al, 1989), we opted to use prerecorded video vignettes, as opposed to live interactions, to achieve rigorous standardization of the stimuli. Consequently, participants were given the role of observers and required to judge whether the speaker was lying to the interviewers in the video rather than to them personally.…”

“…Examples of previous gaze-reading studies that have successfully used prerecorded video stimuli can be found in Lee et al (1998), Montgomery et al (1998), and most recently in Freire et al (2004).…”

“…A recent study by Freire, Eskritt, and Lee (2004) has shown that 4-year-olds also attach significance to the direction of another's gaze in a deceptive situation. Specifically, when they view an actor whom they know to be lying display contradictory verbal and eye gaze clues about the location of a hidden toy, they will preferentially use the gaze cue to find the toy.…”

The attention-grammar interface: Eye-gaze cues structural choice in children and adults

“…Baron-Cohen, Campbell, Karmiloff-Smith, Grant, and Walker (1995) found that children ages 3 and 4 years old deduce the direction of gaze of a schematic face and they can ascribe mental states such as desires on the basis of the direction of gaze (see also Lee, Eskritt, Symons, & Muir, 1998). Thus, understanding that direction of gaze can indicate which objects a person knows exists, is currently attending to, and holds a mental state about can help a child infer much about the current visual world (although this understanding may not be as flexible as adults when cues conflict e.g., Friere, Eskritt, & Lee, 2004;Pellicano & Rhodes, 2003;Pellicano and Rhodes, 2003).…”

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