Gaze Perception Triggers Reflexive Visuospatial Orienting

Abstract

This paper seeks to bring together two previously separate research traditions: research on spatial orienting within the visual cueing paradigm and research into social cognition, addressing our tendency to attend in the direction that another person looks. Cueing methodologies from mainstream attention research were adapted to test the automaticity of orienting in the direction of seen gaze. Three studies manipulated the direction of gaze in a computerized face, which appeared centrally in a frontal view during a peripheral letter-discrimination task. Experiments 1 and 2 found faster discrimination of peripheral target letters on the side the computerized face gazed towards, even though the seen gaze did not predict target side, and despite participants being asked to ignore the face. This suggests reflexive covert and/or overt orienting in the direction of seen gaze, arising even when the observer has no motivation to orient in this way. Experiment 3 found faster letter discrimination on the side the computerized face gazed towards even when participants knew that target letters were four times as likely on the opposite side. This suggests that orienting can arise in the direction of seen gaze even when counter to intentions. The experiments illustrate that methods from mainstream attention research can be usefully applied to social cognition, and that studies of spatial attention may profit from considering its social function.

Do Gaze Cues in Complex Scenes Capture and Direct the Attention of High Functioning Adolescents with ASD? Evidence from Eye-tracking

“…This study has extended the findings of attentional cueing paradigms (e.g. Charwarska et al 2003;Driver et al 1999;Swettenham et al 2003;Ristic et al 2005) which demonstrated that gaze direction cues attention in both typically developing individuals and those with ASD. Our study replicates this finding with more ecologically valid stimuli involving highly complex photographic scenes.…”

“…Many studies have demonstrated the strength of another person's eye-gaze as a cue in various attention cueing paradigms (Driver et al 1999;Friesen & Kingstone, 1998;Langton & Bruce, 1999). Gaze cueing in such paradigms appears to be relatively intact in Eye-tracking in Autism 7 ASD (Chawarska, Klin & Volkmar, 2003;Ristic et al 2005;Swettenham, Condie, Milne & Coleman, 2003).…”

“…Based on previous research using attention cueing paradigms (Driver et al 1999;Friesen & Kingstone, 1998;Langton & Bruce, 1999) we predicted that the eye-gaze direction of the person in the scene will be a strong cue, affecting visual fixation patterns.…”

Attentional bias to angry faces using the dot-probe task? It depends when you look for it

“…the visual search task) the stimuli in the dot-probe paradigm are entirely irrelevant to the task the participant has to perform. This makes the dot-probe paradigm a relatively conservative test of whether or not a given stimulus is actually capturing attention (Driver et al, 1999). On the other hand, the failure to find effects in this paradigm could also be attributable to the fact that the dot-probe task, in its standard form, only measures a snapshot of attention, i.e.…”

The eye gaze direction of an observed person can bias perception, memory, and attention in adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder

“…Research has shown that perception of people's direction of gaze can strongly influence one's own focus of attention and preferences (see Frischen, Bayliss & Tipper, 2007 for a review). For instance, we are highly perceptive of people's direction of gaze and we generally attend to where others are looking (Watt, 1992;Langton & Bruce, 1999;Freeth, Chapman, Ropar & Mitchell, in press), even if it is not predictive of anything (Driver et al 1999;Bayliss & Tipper, 2005;Friesen & Kingstone, 1998). Processing eye gaze direction can even cause an individual to prefer a particular object which has been looked at over one that has not (Bayliss, Paul, Cannon & Tipper, 2006).…”