Abstract
The orientation of the head is an important cue for gaze direction, and its role has been explained in a dual route model. The model incorporates both an attractive and a repulsive effect of head orientation, which act to support accurate gaze perception across large changes in natural stimuli. However, in all previous studies of which we are aware, measurements of the influence of head orientation on perceived gaze direction were obtained using a single-interval methodology, which may have been affected by response bias. Here we compare the single-interval methodology with a two-interval (bias-minimising) design. We find that although measures obtained using the two-interval design showed a stronger attractive effect of head orientation than previous studies, the influence of head orientation on perceived gaze direction still represents a genuine perceptual effect. Measurements obtained using the two-interval design were also shown to be more stable across sessions one week apart. These findings suggest the two-interval design should be used in future experiments, especially if comparing groups who may systematically differ in their biases, such as patients with schizophrenia or autism.
Highlights
The orientation of the head is an important cue for gaze direction, and its role has been explained in a dual route model
The direction of the head acts as a coarse scale spatial cue to the direction of gaze; observers are quicker to judge the direction of gaze when the eyes and the head are oriented in the same direction[11,12,13,14] and direct gaze is reported over a wider range of gaze deviations when a stimulus with a direct head is presented in the periphery[14]
Whilst observers’ responses in the single-interval task indicated, on average, a negative weighting of head orientation on perceived gaze direction, as in previous experiments using this task design, the two-interval task indicated that this weighting may be positive
Summary
The orientation of the head is an important cue for gaze direction, and its role has been explained in a dual route model. Evidence suggests that a multitude of other information, exterior to the eye region, is used to optimise the perception of gaze direction across large changes in natural stimuli both for accuracy and social value, such as the emotional expression[5], contextual objects[6], and prior expectations[7,8,9,10] Another important cue in perceiving the direction of another’s gaze is the rotation of the head. The rotation of the head has a direct attractive effect on the perceived gaze direction, pulling the perceived direction of gaze towards the direction of head orientation This tends to counteract an indirect repulsive effect on the eye region information in accordance with the relative deviation of the pupil within the visible part of the sclera. The model is able to explain peculiarities in the perception of gaze direction such as in the Wollaston effect, wherein the perceived direction of gaze changes when the same eyes are placed within heads of differing orientations[17]
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