Abstract
Direct gaze is a crucial signal in human social communication, which is known to attract visual attention and modulate a wide range of behaviours. The present study investigated whether direct gaze facilitates rapid orienting to faces, which is important for adaptive on-line communication, and its neural correlates. Fifteen participants performed a rapid orienting task, in which they were instructed to saccade to peripherally presented buildings or faces containing direct or averted gaze as quickly as possible. Electroencephalographic recordings were made during the task. Shorter express saccade latencies were found for faces with direct gaze, compared to averted gaze or buildings, while no significant difference was found between faces with averted gaze and buildings. Furthermore, saccade-locked event-related potential (ERP) amplitudes in parieto-occipital areas discriminated faces with direct gaze from buildings and faces with averted gaze corroborating behavioural results. These results show that detection of direct gaze facilitates rapid orienting to faces.
Highlights
One of the hallmarks of social communication is its dynamic and rapidly changing nature
Note that the latency of express saccades for faces with averted gaze and for buildings did not differ significantly, which suggests that the rapid orienting to faces when compared with other objects (Crouzet et al, 2010) might depend on the perception of direct gaze
Such a rapid orienting to direct gaze was only observed in the left visual hemifield, consistent with a left visual hemifield bias previously found for rapid face detection (Crouzet et al, 2010)
Summary
One of the hallmarks of social communication is its dynamic and rapidly changing nature. Direct gaze is a relevant social cue signalling attention and/or intention toward oneself (Frischen, Bayliss, & Tipper, 2007; Senju & Johnson, 2009) It is preferentially detected by newborns (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002) and modulates several concurrent tasks including emotion discrimination (Adams & Kleck, 2005) and identity encoding and retrieval (Conty & Grèzes, 2012; Hood, Macrae, Cole-Davies, & Dias, 2003). To account for the neural mechanisms underlying preferential processing of direct gaze, Senju and Johnson (2009) proposed a fast-track modulator model, which hypothesizes that direct gaze is initially detected by a subcortical pathway, which subsequently modulates the cortical processing of social signals. We explored a putative left visual field (LVF) bias for this effect since a better discrimination of gaze direction has been observed in the LVF (Ricciardelli, Ro, & Driver, 2002), as well as a more prominent effect of direct gaze (Palanica & Itier, 2011)
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