Search

Funder: University of Cambridge, 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 eye-gaze 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.

Direct gaze-someone gazing at you-is an important social cue that might be expected to capture visual attention, even in the presence of other faces. Consistent with this, direct gazing eyes are often detected more rapidly in arrays of averted gazing eyes, than vice versa; a search asymmetry termed the stare-in-the-crowd effect (SITCE). Here, we examine top-down influences on the SITCE by manipulating observers' knowledge of the target's gaze prior to the search display. Our findings revealed two dissociable components of the SITCE. The first, which scaled with set size but was unaffected by prior knowledge, was attributed to noisy, parallel gaze processing that guides attention toward direct gaze (Process 1). The second, an overall response time advantage for direct versus averted gaze targets, irrespective of set size, was attributed to criteria for determining target presence versus absence (Process 2). Prior knowledge of the target's gaze direction increased the direct gaze advantage, rather than speeding up responses for both target types (typically expected for 100% valid cues). This unusual pattern suggests that top-down gaze-related influences may comprise an obligatory bias toward direct gaze. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).