Enhanced detection of gaze toward an object: Sociocognitive influences on visual search
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BRIEF REPORT
Enhanced detection of gaze toward an object: Sociocognitive influences on visual search Nayantara Ramamoorthy 1
&
Oliver Jamieson 1 & Nahiyan Imaan 1 & Kate Plaisted-Grant 1 & Greg Davis 1
Accepted: 26 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
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 eyegaze 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. Keywords Visual search . Gaze perception . Gaze-object relations . Social processing
Introduction 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). Perception of another’s eye gaze activates a large-scale social-cognition network in the human brain (e.g. Carlin & Calder, 2013; McCrackin & Itier, 2019), and is considered a foundation for social development (e.g., BaronCohen, 1994; Baron-Cohen, 2005; Charman et al., 2000; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). Given their crucial importance, one would expect visual attention to be drawn toward eyes, when they are present. Not all eyes need be of equal priority, however. Those gazing toward us (‘direct gaze’) or at other relevant objects and events may be particularly informative and so prioritised over ‘other gaze’ during search.
* Nayantara Ramamoorthy [email protected] Greg Davis [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Previous work on this topic has largely compared direct gaze (directed to the observer) with averted gaze (directed elsewhere). Direct gaze, assumed to be of greater importance, has been reported to engage attention more effectively (Senju & Hasegawa, 2005; Ueda, Takahashi, & Watanabe, 2014), even when task-irrelevant (Böckler, van der Wel, & Welsh, 2014; Doi & Shinohara, 2013; Yokoyama, Sakai, Noguchi, & Kita, 2014). Moreover, in visual search, direct-gazing eyes are typically detected more rapidly among averted-gazing distracters than vice versa — a ‘stare-in-the-crowd’ effect (SITCE; Conty, Tijus, Hugueville, Coelho, & George, 2006; Ramamoorthy, Plaisted-Grant, & Davis, 2019; Senju, Hasegawa, & Tojo, 2005;
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