Abstract
Gaze represents a major non-verbal communication channel in social interactions. In this respect, when facing another person, one's gaze should not be examined as a purely perceptive process but also as an action-perception online performance. However, little is known about processes involved in the real-time self-regulation of social gaze. The present study investigates the impact of a gaze-contingent viewing window on fixation patterns and the awareness of being the agent moving the window. In face-to-face scenarios played by a virtual human character, the task for the 18 adult participants was to interpret an equivocal sentence which could be disambiguated by examining the emotional expressions of the character speaking. The virtual character was embedded in naturalistic backgrounds to enhance realism. Eye-tracking data showed that the viewing window induced changes in gaze behavior, notably longer visual fixations. Notwithstanding, only half of the participants ascribed the window displacements to their eye movements. These participants also spent more time looking at the eyes and mouth regions of the virtual human character. The outcomes of the study highlight the dissociation between non-volitional gaze adaptation and the self-ascription of agency. Such dissociation provides support for a two-step account of the sense of agency composed of pre-noetic monitoring mechanisms and reflexive processes, linked by bottom-up and top-down processes. We comment upon these results, which illustrate the relevance of our method for studying online social cognition, in particular concerning autism spectrum disorders (ASD) where the poor pragmatic understanding of oral speech is considered linked to visual peculiarities that impede facial exploration.
Highlights
When looking at someone else’s face, we tend to scan preferentially and consistently the eye and mouth regions (Mertens et al, 1993) we are not aware of doing so
We examined the effects of the window on fixation patterns in order to assess the self-monitoring of gaze and recorded the participants’ answers about what controlled the window to assess their judgment of agency
The method used here for examining agency could be relevant for non-social stimuli, the focus of interest in the present study addresses online face-to-face interaction that involves high-order gaze control guided by social considerations
Summary
When looking at someone else’s face, we tend to scan preferentially and consistently the eye and mouth regions (Mertens et al, 1993) we are not aware of doing so. Making frequent eye-contact can be experienced by the responder as threatening or intrusive and increases her/his emotional state (Senju and Johnson, 2009) This leads interacting partners in many cultures not to stare too long at each other, or even, as in the Wolof tradition, not to look at all at the partner while speaking (Meyer and Girke, 2011). Frischen et al (2007) suggest that the acute emotional response triggered by the eye-gaze of others could lead some individuals to learn to avoid looking directly at the eye region of others, developing a voluntary control of gaze processing. We modulate our gaze according to social rules and our own sensitivity to eye-contact, we are usually unaware of controlling it
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