Abstract
Observing others’ gaze is most informative during social encounters between humans: We can learn about potentially salient objects in the shared environment, infer others’ mental states and detect their communicative intentions. We almost automatically follow the gaze of others in order to check the relevance of the target of the other’s attention. This phenomenon called gaze cueing can be conceptualized as a triadic interaction involving a gaze initiator, a gaze follower and a gaze target, i.e., an object or person of interest in the environment. Gaze cueing can occur as “gaze pointing” with a communicative or “social” intention by the initiator, telling the observer that she/he is meant to follow, or as an incidental event, in which the observer follows spontaneously without any intention of the observed person. Here, we investigate which gaze cues let an observer ascribe a social intention to the observed person’s gaze and whether and to which degree previous eye contact in combination with an object fixation contributes to this ascription. We varied the orientation of the starting position of gaze toward the observer and the orientation of the end position of a lateral gaze shift. In two experiments participants had to infer from the gaze behavior either mere approach (“the person looked at me”) vs. a social (“the person wanted to show me something”) or a social vs. a private motivation (“the person was interested in something”). Participants differentially attributed either approach behavior, a social, or a private intention to the agent solely based on the passive observation of the two specific gaze cues of start and end position. While for the attribution of privately motivated behavior, participants relied solely on the end position of the gaze shift, the social interpretation of the observed behavior depended additionally upon initial eye contact. Implications of these results for future social gaze and social cognition research in general are discussed.
Highlights
The eye region displays emotional and attentional states and is a crucial element in understanding the inner experiences of others (Baron-Cohen et al, 1997; Emery, 2000)
We investigated the difference between situations in which participants had the impression of been looked at by the virtual character (VC) (“LOOK” condition) and situations in which they had the impression that the VC was trying to show them something (“COM,” e.g., “communicative,” condition)
Direct gaze or starting points close to it during the initial gaze and large gaze shifts significantly fostered the impression of being shown something. This matches the role of eye contact conveying communicative intentions (Kleinke, 1986) and nicely fits accounts of eye contact being used as ostensive cue
Summary
The eye region displays emotional and attentional states and is a crucial element in understanding the inner experiences of others (Baron-Cohen et al, 1997; Emery, 2000) This leads to the pivotal role of gaze in social cognition research (Shepherd, 2010) because it informs about internal states of persons and about their relationship to objects or persons in their environment. Humans process the gaze direction, deduce from it the focus of attention and automatically shift their own attention . This process is called gaze cueing (Frischen et al, 2007) and is a prerequisite for joint attention, the case in which both persons visually attend the same object. It is believed to be a prerequisite component for reinforcement learning (Vernetti et al, 2017)
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