Adaptation to the Direction of Others’ Gaze: A Review

Colin W G Clifford,Colin J Palmer

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02165

Abstract

The direction of another person’s gaze provides us with a strong cue to their intentions and future actions, and, correspondingly, the human visual system has evolved to extract information about others’ gaze from the sensory stream. The perception of gaze is a remarkably plastic process: adaptation to a particular direction of gaze over a matter of seconds or minutes can cause marked aftereffects in our sense of where other people are looking. In this review, we first discuss the measurement, specificity, and neural correlates of gaze aftereffects. We then examine how studies that have explored the perceptual and neural determinants of gaze aftereffects have provided key insights into the nature of how other people’s gaze direction is represented within the visual hierarchy. This includes the level of perceptual representation of gaze direction (e.g., relating to integrated vs. local facial features) and the interaction of this system with higher-level social-cognitive functions, such as theory of mind. Moreover, computational modeling of data from behavioral studies of gaze adaptation allows us to make inferences about the functional principles that govern the neural encoding of gaze direction. This in turn provides a foundation for testing computational theories of neuropsychiatric conditions in which gaze processing is compromised, such as autism.

Highlights

Eye gaze signals play a critical role in human communication and interaction (Argyle and Cook, 1976)
The perception of gaze direction is an interesting phenomenon to study in part because it sits at the interface between visual perception and social cognition
We examine how gaze aftereffects have substantiated a framework for understanding the sensory coding of gaze direction in the visual system, including the computational mechanisms that underlie these effects

Summary

Introduction

Eye gaze signals play a critical role in human communication and interaction (Argyle and Cook, 1976). The study of Stein et al (2012) demonstrates that awareness of the adapting stimulus is required for gaze-specific aftereffects to be generated, it highlights the importance of introducing a manipulation such as a size change between adaptor and test in order to avoid the effects of adaptation at lower levels of processing propagating up through the visual hierarchy.

Results

Conclusion