Abstract
Another person’s gaze direction is a rich source of social information, especially eyes gazing toward prominent or relevant objects. To guide attention to these important stimuli, visual search mechanisms may incorporate sophisticated coding of eye-gaze and its spatial relationship to other objects. Alternatively, any guidance might reflect the action of simple perceptual ‘templates’ tuned to visual features of socially relevant objects, or intrinsic salience of direct-gazing eyes for human vision. Previous findings that direct gaze (toward oneself) is prioritised over averted gaze do not distinguish between these accounts. To resolve this issue, we compared search for eyes gazing toward a prominent object versus gazing away, finding more efficient search for eyes ‘gazing toward’ the object. This effect was most clearly seen in target-present trials when gaze was task-relevant. Visual search mechanisms appear to specify gazer-object relations, a computational building-block of theory of mind.
Highlights
The human eye’s marked dark-iris, light-sclera morphology (Kobayashi & Kohshima, 1997) offers a salient and important social signal (e.g., Cañigueral & Hamilton, 2019; Senju & Johnson, 2009)
The basic task in Experiment 1 was to detect the presence of target eyes in search displays, on the basis that they gazed in the opposite direction to the other eyes
Prior to 75% of search displays, a cue signalled to the observer which gaze direction the target would have, to encourage them to search on the basis of gaze
Summary
The human eye’s marked dark-iris, light-sclera morphology (Kobayashi & Kohshima, 1997) offers a salient and important social signal (e.g., Cañigueral & Hamilton, 2019; Senju & Johnson, 2009). Given direct gaze’s presumed importance, human vision may incorporate a perceptual template (bottom-up or top-down) that detects direct gaze in retinal input and guides attention toward it – such a template might be unconscious (e.g., Madipakkam, Rothkirch, Guggenmos, Heinz, & Sterzer, 2015) or innately specified (e.g., Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002; Senju & Johnson, 2009) and need only specify direct gaze’s visual features (a combination of sclera and circular iris features) As these two alternative possibilities attest, human vision could prioritise direct gaze without coding gaze as gaze. These new conditions provide a previously unexploited opportunity to study sociocognitive processes involved in attentional guidance during search, helping to circumvent the difficulties of interpretation for other social stimuli (highlighted by Vestner, Gray, & Cook, 2020)
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