Gaze Stimuli Research Articles

How do emotion and gaze direction interfere with overt orienting of visual attention?

Background Several studies using spatial cueing paradigms have demonstrated that observing gaze direction may trigger a reflexive visual orienting in the direction of the other person’s gaze. Recently, it has been reported that facial expression may enhance the reflexive orienting of attention to gaze stimuli. However, some researchers have also suggested that, rather than facilitating attentional orienting away from the face, emotional expressions may, in fact, delay or prevent orienting. In the present study we investigated the effects of facial expression and gaze direction on a visual orienting oculomotor task to test whether an angry face may or may not interfere with visual orienting.

Here's Looking at You, Kid

Children with fragile X syndrome (fraX) are at risk for manifesting abnormalities in social function that overlap with features of autism and social anxiety disorder. In this study, we analyzed brain activation in response to face and gaze stimuli to better understand neural functioning associated with social perception in fraX. Eleven female subjects with fraX, aged 10 to 22 years, were compared with age-matched female control subjects. Photographs of forward-facing and angled faces, each having direct and averted gaze (4 types of stimuli), were presented in an event-related design during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects were instructed to determine the direction of gaze for each photograph. Activation in brain regions known to respond to face and gaze stimuli, the fusiform gyrus (FG) and superior temporal sulcus (STS), were compared between groups to isolate neural abnormalities in the perception of directed social stimuli. The fraX subjects had decreased accuracy in determining the direction of gaze compared with controls. Region of interest analysis of the FG revealed a significant interaction between diagnostic group and face orientation. Specifically, control subjects had greater FG activation to forward than to angled faces, whereas fraX subjects had no difference in FG activation to forward and angled faces. Controls showed greater left STS activation to all stimuli compared with fraX subjects. Our results suggest that gaze aversion in fraX subjects is related to decreased specialization of the FG in the perception of face orientation. Decreased STS activation in fraX suggests aberrant processing of gaze. These data suggest that gaze aversion in fraX may be related to dysfunction of neural systems underlying both face and gaze processing.

My eyes want to look where your eyes are looking: exploring the tendency to imitate another individual's gaze.

In this study we investigated the tendency of humans to imitate the gaze direction of other individuals. Distracting gaze stimuli or non biological directional cues (arrows) were presented to observers performing an instructed saccadic eye movement task. Eye movement recordings showed that observers performed less accurately when the distracting gaze and the instructed saccade had opposite directions, with a substantial number of saccades matching the direction of the distracting gaze. Static (Experiment 1) and dynamic (Experiment 2) gaze distracters, but not pointing arrows (Experiment 3), produced the effect. Results show a strong predisposition of humans to imitate somebody else's oculomotor behaviour, even when detrimental to task performance. This is likely linked to a strong tendency to share attentional states of other individuals, known as joint attention.

The detection of gaze direction: a stare-in-the-crowd effect.

A visual-search paradigm was used to explore the relative ease with which the direction of gaze can be detected. Straight-gaze stimuli were presented as targets within a variable number of distractors with left-averted or right-averted gaze. Reaction time in this case was compared with that when either the left-averted or right-averted gaze stimuli were the targets among distractors of the two remaining gaze directions. The data were examined for the existence of a search asymmetry favoring the straight-gaze targets. Such an asymmetry was found with stimuli that were realistically drawn renditions of pairs of human eyes, as well as with similar schematic stimuli representing pairs of human eyes. The asymmetry, however, was not found with geometric control stimuli, which also presented the critical feature in the central, the left-lateral, or the right-lateral position within the stimulus, but were not eyelike. It was also not found for schematic stimuli consisting of only one eye. It was concluded that the straight gaze direction is a special stimulus with eyelike stimuli, which the visual system is set up to process faster and with fewer errors than averted gaze directions. The results are discussed in terms of the evolutionary significance of the straight gaze direction.