Abstract
People are drawn to social, animate things more than inanimate objects. Previous research has also shown gaze following in humans, a process that has been linked to theory of mind (ToM). In three experiments, we investigated whether animacy and ToM are involved when making judgements about the location of a cursor in a scene. In Experiment 1, participants were told that this cursor represented the gaze of an observer and were asked to decide whether the observer was looking at a target object. This task is similar to that carried out by researchers manually coding eye-tracking data. The results showed that participants were biased to perceive the gaze cursor as directed towards animate objects (faces) compared to inanimate objects. In Experiments 2 and 3 we tested the role of ToM, by presenting the same scenes to new participants but now with the statement that the cursor was generated by a ‘random’ computer system or by a computer system designed to seek targets. The bias to report that the cursor was directed toward faces was abolished in Experiment 2, and minimised in Experiment 3. Together, the results indicate that people attach minds to the mere representation of an individual's gaze, and this attribution of mind influences what people believe an individual is looking at.
Highlights
People are drawn to social, animate things more than inanimate objects
These are often measured by asking people to judge what other people know, or why they behave the way they do, and there is considerable scientific interest in understanding how theory of mind (ToM) develops and how it is related to behaviours such as perspective taking and empathy14,15
The present study takes an alternative approach and turns the traditional gaze following approach on its head, by measuring whether ToM affects the interpretation of another person’s gaze direction. We achieved this goal by presenting observers with prototypical data collected from a mobile eye tracking study and asking the observers to indicate if the fixation cursor, which represents the gaze direction of another person, is directed toward different items in a visual scene
Summary
Model comparisons demonstrated a significant improvement (χ2(1) = 21.48 p < 0.001) and a reliable interaction (β = 0.88, ± 0.19 SE, p < 0.001) This confirms that the effect of Target Type was different, and negligible, when participants rated the cursor believing it to represent random selections by a computer and not human gaze. It is possible that the mere presence of a face in the scene increases responses to anything, a general social facilitation which could be tested by using images with both a face and a non-face target presented in parallel This cannot explain the way that the same cursor is treated differently when it is associated with human gaze. The present study demonstrates that observers attach minds to representations of other people’s gaze, to images of their eyes, and to stimuli that represent where those eyes are directed, and this attribution of mind influences what observers believe an individual is looking at
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
