Gaze Perception Triggers Reflexive Visuospatial Orienting
Summary (3 min read)
INTRODUCTION
- This paper seeks to bring together two highly active areas of current research, which have previously been considered quite separately.
- Variations on this basic cueing methodology have led to two important distinctions.
- In particular, the authors sought to determine whether such orienting can arise reflexively, as found for the exogenous orienting observed within standard spatial cueing paradigms, in response to salient but spatially uninformative peripheral events.
EXPERIMENT 1
- The authors first study investigated whether the direction of seen gaze, in a photographed face appearing on a computer screen, would induce "exogenous" spatial orienting, in the sense that has been previously defined for uninformative peripheral cues within traditional spatial cueing studies (e.g. Klein et al., 1992; Posner, 1980; Spence & Driver, 1994) .
- The authors method involved aspects from both standard peripheral cueing techniques and from standard central-cueing techniques.
- As with the cue events in previous central-cueing studies (which had typically used arrows pointing towards one or other side; e.g. Posner, 1980) , the face cue always appeared at the centre of the screen, at fixation.
- Unlike traditional central-arrow cues, the direction in which the central eyes pointed was spatially uninformative about the probable location of the subsequent target, which was equally likely to appear on either side.
METHODS
- The nine participants were all undergraduates at Cambridge University, with normal or corrected-to-normal vision, who were naive as to the purpose of the experiment.
- Target letters were an upper-case L or T, each subtending 3°and centred 5°away from the centre of the screen on one or other side.
- The exact time-course for the predicted cueing effect from gaze direction in the central face for the present study is somewhat hard to anticipate, however.
Results
- The median RTs, and associated error rates, were derived for each of the six conditions (congruent/incongruent × 3 SOAs) for every participant.
- Figure 4 shows the inter-participant means of median RTs for each condition, together with the mean error percentages in parentheses.
- As before, the error rates were low and did not vary systematically with congruency condition or SOA, nor showed any signs of speed-accuracy trade-offs.
Discussion
- The direction of gaze by the central face had a reliable effect on performance in the letter-discrimination task, even though the face was totally irrelevant to that task, and provided no information about where the target letter was likely to appear.
- This could delay any subsequent shift of exogenous attention in the direction of the face's gaze.
- That is, there was no evidence of the inhibition of return (IOR) phenomenon that can be found at longer SOAs after peripheral uninformative cues, whereby spatially congruent cues start to produce slower responses than spatially incongruent cues, at longer delays (see Posner & Cohen, 1984) .
- Nevertheless, their usual cueing effect-namely an advantage for target letters on the side that the face gazed towards-was replicated once more at the 300-msec SOA.
- The persistence of their usual cueing effect at the 300-msec S0A, producing an advantage for targets on the side that the face gazed towards, suggests that orienting in the direction of seen gaze can be an automatic process, in the strong sense of arising even when counter to a person's current intentions.
EXPERIMENT 2
- The next study followed the method of Experiment 1 with just one exception.
- Participants were now given considerable time to process the face, and to recover from its sudden onset at the centre of the screen, before any eye information was presented.
- The authors expected to replicate the advantage for letter discrimination on congruent trials that was found in Experiment 1.
- If the atypically slow time-course of that cueing effect had been in part due to attention being captured by the sudden appearance of a face at the centre of the screen, the authors expected that the effect should now become more robust at shorter SOAs, since the new procedure gave 522 FIG.
- Then, 675 msec later, the face appeared, with eyes appearing "closed" due to the superimposed grey patches (Frame 2).
Methods
- The methods were identical to Experiment 1, except for the insertion of a central face with eyes occluded for 900 msec at the start of each trial .
- The eight new participants were Cambridge University undergraduates with normal vision.
- This experiment was exactly like Experiment 2 except for a change in the probability of particular conditions.
- Trials with the target letter appearing on the side that the face gazed away from were now four times as likely as trials where the face gazed towards the subsequent target .
- Accordingly, the former type of trial is now referred to as "expected" rather than "incongruent", and likewise the previous "congruent" trials are now referred to as "unexpected".
EXPERIMENT 3
- In the final study, the target was now four times as likely to appear on the side away from where the central face gazed . than to appear on the side that the face gazed towards .
- Participants were reminded of these probabilities at the beginning of every block, and in any case had ample opportunity to discover the negative contingency between direction of gaze and likely target side for themselves, within the practice block and subsequent blocks.
- The logic of this study is analogous to previous studies on the automaticity of exogenous spatial orienting in response to meaningless but salient peripheral cues.
- If so, the authors would expect letter discrimination to be faster on the side that the central face gazes towards (at relatively early cue-target intervals, such as the 300-msec SOA) even though participants strongly expected the target to appear on the opposite side.
- At longer cue-target intervals (e.g. the present 70 msec SOA), participants may have sufficient time to succeed in "pushing" their attention endogenously over to the expected side, as found at long delays after counter-informative peripheral cues (Spence & Driver, 1994) .
GENERAL DISCUSSION
- The main theme of this paper is that the study of spatial orienting within mainstream attention research may be enriched by considering important social aspects of attention; and that, conversely, research on social cognition might usefully exploit some of the methodological and theoretical advances within mainstream attention research.
- The authors examined whether orienting in the direction of seen gaze is automatic in two very specific senses.
- It will be important to test whether the orienting that the authors have identified here will also pass the many additional criteria for automaticity that have been proposed in cognitive psychology.
- The effects of their uninformative gaze-cue resemble those of traditional informative central cues more closely than those caused by uninformative peripheral cues.
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Cites background from "Gaze Perception Triggers Reflexive ..."
...Shifting attention in response to perceived gaze direction apparently is reflexive, occurring even when subjects are told that the direction of perceived gaze is irrelevant (Driver et al 1999; Friesen and Kingstone 1998; Hietanen 1999; Langton and Bruce 1999)....
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References
11,452 citations
"Gaze Perception Triggers Reflexive ..." refers background in this paper
...Experiments 1 and 2 found faster discrimination of peripheral target letters on the side the computerized face gazed towards, even though the seen gaze did not predict target side, and despite participants being asked to ignore the face....
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...See text for details of the sequence of events on each trial. a. b. rapidly as possible on each trial whether the letter was a T or an L, a discrimination which has previously been held to require focused visual attention (e.g. Sagi & Julesz, 1985; Treisman & Gelade, 1980)....
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"Gaze Perception Triggers Reflexive ..." refers background or methods in this paper
...For instance, our data are entirely silent on the issue of whether gaze-following reflects innately specified mechanisms, as Fodor (1983) suggested for his proposed modules, or instead results from extensive social experience....
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...In the present paper, we apply a further traditional criterion for modularity (see Fodor, 1983 ) to the specific case of shared attention in response to seen gaze; namely, its possible automaticity of operation in adult humans....
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...Specialized modules have several defining characteristics according to Fodor (1983) , as discussed later....
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...Experiment 3); independent of set-size; unconscious; innate; highly practised; informationally encapsulated; cognitively impenetrable; modularized; and dependent on dedicated neural systems (Bargh, 1992; Carr, 1992; Fodor, 1983; Logan, 1992; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977)....
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Frequently Asked Questions (10)
Q2. What are the future works in "Gaze perception triggers reflexive visuospatial orienting" ?
These results have several implications for mainstream attention research, for the study of social cognition and for future attempts to bring these two areas together in a fruitful manner. However, it remains for future research to determine whether the orienting that the authors have documented reflects specialized modules with all the other characteristics that Fodor first proposed. Further studies with this method may reveal orienting in response to seen gaze by even younger babies. However, their gaze-cues differed in so many respects from standard central or peripheral cues ( e. g. not only in their physical size and eccentricity, but also in the information that must be encoded to determine which side they should benefit ), that further work would be needed for any full understanding of the basis for these similarities and dissimilarities.
Q3. What is the role of gaze perception in the development of vocabulary?
Baldwin (1991) showed that gaze perception plays a role in vocabulary acquisition by toddlers, since the direction in which a speaker looks can indicate the intended referent of unfamiliar words.
Q4. How long did the participants recover from the sudden onset of the central face?
after a variable delay depending on cue–target SOA, the target letter appeared on one side (Frame 4).participants 900 msec to recover from the sudden onset of the central face, before the onset of the eyes.
Q5. What is the meaning of orienting in response to a seen face?
As discussed earlier, Baron-Cohen (1995) has recently proposed that orienting in response to seen gaze is automatic, in the particular sense of being driven by a specialized Fodorian module.
Q6. What is the effect of the cueing effect on the side that the central face gazed?
by 700-msec after presentation of the cue, the cueing effect was significantly reduced (and, indeed, was reversed in sign) when participants could develop the expectancy that the target was most likely to appear on the side that the face gazed away from (i.e. in Experiment 3 as compared with Experiment 2).
Q7. Why did Humphrey suggest that the ability to attend in different directions may have evolved?
Many authors (e.g. Humphrey, 1976) have suggested that their ability to attend covertly in different directions may have evolved partly to mask their intentions and interests from others, who may be monitoring their gaze direction.
Q8. What is the likely explanation for the shift of attention in the direction of seen gaze?
It seems more likely to us that covert attention initially shifted in the direction of seen gaze in this study, rather than overt attention, since it is quite straightforward to demonstrate in everyday life that adults can suppress overt saccades in the direction of seen gaze, at will.
Q9. What is the difference between overt and covert orienting?
Overt orienting refers to shifts in receptors, such as eye-movements towards the cued side, which will obviously enhance target detection on that side owing to the greater sensitivity of foveal receptors.
Q10. What mechanism may allow us to “look” automatically where someone else is gazing?
Covert intentional mechanisms may allow us to “look” automatically where someone else is gazing, while disguising this fact from them and any other parties.