The eye contact effect: mechanisms and development

Senju, Atsushi; Johnson, Mark H.

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.11.009

Cited by 693 publications

(767 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…This increased neural sensitivity to eyes showing direct gaze might be explained by the fact that especially during infancy, direct gaze (eye contact) serves as such a powerful signal in directing attention and learning (eye contact effect, ref. 69) and only with further development, mature (adult-like) responding to averted gaze fear is achieved. Regardless of the exact interpretations, the current results clearly demonstrate that brain mechanisms exist, which allow infants to readily respond to information from eyes, even in the absence of conscious awareness.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unconscious discrimination of social cues from eye whites in infants

Jessen

Großmann

2014

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

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Human eyes serve two key functions in face-to-face social interactions: they provide cues about a person's emotional state and attentional focus (gaze direction). Both functions critically rely on the morphologically unique human sclera and have been shown to operate even in the absence of conscious awareness in adults. However, it is not known whether the ability to respond to social cues from scleral information without conscious awareness exists early in human ontogeny and can therefore be considered a foundational feature of human social functioning. In the current study, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to show that 7-mo-old infants discriminate between fearful and nonfearful eyes (experiment 1) and between direct and averted gaze (experiment 2), even when presented below the perceptual threshold. These effects were specific to the human sclera and not seen in response to polarityinverted eyes. Our results suggest that early in ontogeny the human brain detects social cues from scleral information even in the absence of conscious awareness. The current findings support the view that the human eye with its prominent sclera serves critical communicative functions during human social interactions.infancy | social perception | human eye | subliminal processing | emotion processing

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unconscious discrimination of social cues from eye whites in infants

Jessen

Großmann

2014

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

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“…Infant fixation on social content is being developed to monitor development after preterm birth (De Schuymer, De Groote, Desoete, & Roeyers, 2012) and as a potential early marker of later autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis (Elsabbagh & Johnson, 2009; Jones & Klin, 2013). In this latter field, the role of fixation on the eye region as a key to social communication skill development is of particular interest (Senju & Johnson, 2009). …”

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confidence: 99%

Multiple Measures of Fixation on Social Content in Infancy: Evidence for a Single Social Cognitive Construct?

Gillespie‐Smith

Boardman

Murray

et al. 2015

Infancy

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The preference of infants to fixate on social information in a stimulus is well known. We examine how this preference manifests across a series of free‐viewing tasks using different stimulus types. Participants were thirty typically developing infants. We measured eye movements when viewing isolated faces, faces alongside objects in a grid, and faces naturally presented in photographed scenes. In each task, infants fixated social content for longer than nonsocial content. Social preference scores representing distribution of fixation to social versus general image content were highly correlated and thus combined into a single composite measure, which was independent of demographic and behavioral measures. We infer that multiple eye‐tracking tasks can be used to generate a composite measure of social preference in infancy. This approach may prove useful in the early characterization of developmental disabilities.

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“…Pelphrey et al 2002;Walkersmith et al 1977). This preference is present from birth (Haith et al 1979;Johnson et al 1991;Maurer and Salapatek 1976), and may aid in the development of more advanced social cognitive ability (see Morton and Johnson 1991;Senju and Johnson 2009b). The eye-region plays a key role in interpersonal interaction.…”

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confidence: 99%