Abstract
We examined infants’ sensitivity to eye-gaze direction and its influence on object processing in 4-month-old infants by manipulating low-level properties of gaze cues. Infants were presented with two kinds of stimuli that either did or did not cue novel objects. The movement of a schematic image of two eyes (two black circles each moving on a white oval background) led to an enhanced processing of the cued object. A cue with reversed polarity (two white circles each moving on a black oval background) elicited distinctly weaker effects. Results highlight infants’ specific sensitivity to isolated eye gaze which furthermore facilitates object encoding. It is suggested that this sensitivity relies on the typical perceptual pattern of eyes, the black pupil on a white sclera.
Highlights
Human beings are remarkably sensitive to eye-gaze direction of another person right after birth[1, 2]
We examine the role of the particular contrast of eyes, a black pupil on a white sclera, for object encoding in 4-month-olds
Instead of complete faces we presented schematic eyes, two black circles moving on a white oval background, as the cue[12]
Summary
Human beings are remarkably sensitive to eye-gaze direction of another person right after birth[1, 2]. We examine the role of the particular contrast of eyes, a black pupil on a white sclera, for object encoding in 4-month-olds As part of his proposed Mindreading System, Baron-Cohen suggested that infants posses a neural module dedicated to detecting eyes or eye-like stimuli from birth[1, 7]. This Eye Direction Detector (EDD) is sensitive to the specific contrast of the dark region of the pupil and the light region of the sclera and encodes their relative spatial position. Compared to the EDD proposed by Baron-Cohen[7] that focusses on the eye-gaze direction, the DAD can be seen as a more general mechanism which takes into account information from several different sources (eye-gaze direction, head and body posture)[18]
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