Eye movements of monkey observers viewing vocalizing conspecifics

Ghazanfar, Asif A.; Nielsen, Kristina J.; Logothetis, Nikos K.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.12.007

Cited by 64 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…A significant body of research has investigated where people fixate when observing someone talking. Somewhat surprisingly, in general both humans (Vatikiotis-Bateson, Eigsti, Yano, & Munhall, 1998) and monkeys (Ghazanfar, Nielsen, & Logothetis, 2006) look mostly at the eye region, rather than the mouth region, of a vocalizing conspecific. This pattern is confirmed in our finding that the eyes were indeed looked at most frequently.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: Effects of social status and speaking

et al. 2010

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a b s t r a c tHuman visual attention operates in a context that is complex, social and dynamic. To explore this, we recorded people taking part in a group decision-making task and then showed video clips of these situations to new participants while tracking their eye movements. Observers spent the majority of time looking at the people in the videos, and in particular at their eyes and faces. The social status of the people in the clips had been rated by their peers in the group task, and this status hierarchy strongly predicted where eyetracker participants looked: high-status individuals were gazed at much more often, and for longer, than low-status individuals, even over short, 20-s videos. Fixation was temporally coupled to the person who was talking at any one time, but this did not account for the effect of social status on attention. These results are consistent with a gaze system that is attuned to the presence of other individuals, to their social status within a group, and to the information most useful for social interaction.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: Effects of social status and speaking

et al. 2010

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“…During face exploration, both human and non-human primates demonstrated an exaggerated interest in the eye region of the faces of conspecifics (Yarbus 1967;Keating and Keating 1982;Nahm et al 1997;Guo et al 2003;Gothard et al 2004;Ghazanfar et al 2006). This preferential interest in the eyes remained when the eyes or the rest of the facial structures were scrambled.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They are able to discriminate faces of unfamiliar individuals after only a short exposure to sets of their images (Parr et al 2000). Viewing of faces is accompanied by longer fixations compared with natural scenes (Guo et al 2006), and is typically associated with a stereotypical eye scanning patterns (Keating and Keating 1982;Nahm et al 1997;Guo et al 2003;Gothard et al 2004;Ghazanfar et al 2006). Specifically, the eye region in neutral, expressive or vocalizing faces is often the first destination of the saccade and attracts a disproportionate share of fixations compared with other local facial features, suggesting its dominant saliency in the faces.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Initial fixation placement in face images is driven by top–down guidance

Guo

2007

Exp Brain Res

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The eyes are often inspected first and for longer period during face exploration. To examine whether this saliency of the eye region at the early stage of face inspection is attributed to its local structure properties or to the knowledge of its essence in facial communication, in this study we investigated the pattern of eye movements produced by rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) as they free viewed images of monkey faces.Eye positions were recorded accurately using implanted eye coils, while images of original faces, faces with scrambled eyes, and scrambled faces except for the eyes were presented on a computer screen. The eye region in the scrambled faces attracted the same proportion of viewing time and fixations as it did in the original faces, even the scrambled eyes attracted substantial proportion of viewing time and fixations. Furthermore, the monkeys often made the first saccade towards to the location of the eyes regardless of image content. Our results suggest that the initial fixation placement in faces is driven predominantly by 'top-down' or internal factors, such as the prior knowledge of the location of "eyes" within the context of a face.

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“…Although articulatory mouth movements seem to dominantly attract the gaze of primates (53,54), a continuous visual stream might offer a number of time points at which visual input can influence the phase of the ongoing auditory cortical oscillations by capturing the animal's attention and gaze direction (55). Starting from our results, future work can specify whether and how subsequent audiovisual fluctuations in the onset of informative content alter or further affect the described multisensory processes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Natural asynchronies in audiovisual communication signals regulate neuronal multisensory interactions in voice-sensitive cortex

Perrodin

Kayser

Logothetis

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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When social animals communicate, the onset of informative content in one modality varies considerably relative to the other, such as when visual orofacial movements precede a vocalization. These naturally occurring asynchronies do not disrupt intelligibility or perceptual coherence. However, they occur on time scales where they likely affect integrative neuronal activity in ways that have remained unclear, especially for hierarchically downstream regions in which neurons exhibit temporally imprecise but highly selective responses to communication signals. To address this, we exploited naturally occurring face-and voice-onset asynchronies in primate vocalizations. Using these as stimuli we recorded cortical oscillations and neuronal spiking responses from functional MRI (fMRI)-localized voice-sensitive cortex in the anterior temporal lobe of macaques. We show that the onset of the visual face stimulus resets the phase of low-frequency oscillations, and that the face-voice asynchrony affects the prominence of two key types of neuronal multisensory responses: enhancement or suppression. Our findings show a three-way association between temporal delays in audiovisual communication signals, phase-resetting of ongoing oscillations, and the sign of multisensory responses. The results reveal how natural onset asynchronies in cross-sensory inputs regulate network oscillations and neuronal excitability in the voice-sensitive cortex of macaques, a suggested animal model for human voice areas. These findings also advance predictions on the impact of multisensory input on neuronal processes in face areas and other brain regions.H ow the brain parses multisensory input despite the variable and often large differences in the onset of sensory signals across different modalities remains unclear. We can maintain a coherent multisensory percept across a considerable range of spatial and temporal discrepancies (1-4): For example, auditory and visual speech signals can be perceived as belonging to the same multisensory "object" over temporal windows of hundreds of milliseconds (5-7). However, such misalignment can drastically affect neuronal responses in ways that may also differ between brain regions (8-10). We asked how natural asynchronies in the onset of face/voice content in communication signals would affect voice-sensitive cortex, a region in the ventral "object" pathway (11) where neurons (i) are selective for auditory features in communication sounds (12)(13)(14), (ii) are influenced by visual "face" content (12), and (iii) display relatively slow and temporally variable responses in comparison with neurons in primary auditory cortical or subcortical structures (14-16).Neurophysiological studies in human and nonhuman animals have provided considerable insights into the role of cortical oscillations during multisensory conditions and for parsing speech. Cortical oscillations entrain to the slow temporal dynamics of natural sounds (17)(18)(19)(20) and are thought to reflect the excitability of local networks to sensory inputs...

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Eye movements of monkey observers viewing vocalizing conspecifics

Cited by 64 publications

References 37 publications

Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: Effects of social status and speaking

Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: Effects of social status and speaking

Initial fixation placement in face images is driven by top–down guidance

Natural asynchronies in audiovisual communication signals regulate neuronal multisensory interactions in voice-sensitive cortex

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