A generalized tendency toward direct gaze with uncertainty

Abstract

Joint gaze behavior plays a crucial role in nonverbal communication and enhances group interactions. We recently reported that under conditions of uncertainty, observers assume that another person's (left/right averted) gaze is directed towards them, a prior for direct gaze. Given that people's gaze can deviate in many directions during social interactions, we developed a versatile method to examine how the influence of the prior for direct gaze varies across a range of gaze directions in both forward facing and rotated heads. We find that observers tend to report another's gaze along all axes as being more direct when uncertainty is introduced by adding noise to the stimulus. We also find that the influence of the prior is stronger in rotated heads than direct (forward) heads. This is consistent with the idea that, when uncertain, humans tend to judge gaze deviations as being directed at them, regardless of head rotation or axis of deviation.

A Bayesian approach to person perception

“…Evidence of a prior expectation for others' gaze to be directed towards us thus appears to generalize across head orientation, direction of gaze deviation, and behavioural task (Mareschal et al, 2013b(Mareschal et al, , 2014. Future work might profitably employ an alternative operationalization of stimulus uncertainty, such as manipulation of stimulus duration, to confirm that this pattern of results does not depend upon the addition of noise to and reduction of contrast within the eyes.…”

“…In recent studies we have taken a Bayesian experimental approach to investigate the role of prior expectation in the perception of others' direction of gaze, specifically whether someone is looking directly at us or to our left or right (Mareschal et al, 2013b(Mareschal et al, , 2014. Gaze processing has the potential to serve as a useful model system for social neuroscience by virtue of its relative simplicity and the identification of neural mechanisms in the human and non-human primate brains (e.g.…”

“…which face is gazing more to the left). To manipulate the level of uncertainty in the sensory representation we add noise to the eyes of the stimulus in the form of a pseudorandom texture while at the same time decreasing the contrast between the pupil and the sclera (Mareschal, Calder, Dadds, & Clifford, 2013a;Mareschal et al, 2013bMareschal et al, , 2014, as illustrated in Fig. 3A.…”

“…To ensure that our findings generalize beyond the particular forced-choice task employed, and to directions of gaze deviation beyond horizontal, we developed an alternative task in which participants indicated the direction of gaze of a single stimulus by means of an on-screen pointer which they controlled via a computer mouse (Mareschal et al, 2014). Fig.…”

“…In a recent paper, we applied the Bayesian approach for the first time to the processing of a socially relevant perceptual feature, namely the direction of another's gaze (Mareschal, Calder, & Clifford, 2013b). This has provided an important insight into gaze perception, namely that humans have an expectation that gaze is directed towards them that acts to ''pull'' the perceived direction of gaze towards the observer, particularly under conditions of high stimulus uncertainty (see also Mareschal, Otsuka, & Clifford, 2014;Martin & Jones, 1982;Martin & Rovira, 1981;Sheldrake, 2003). We believe that this approach will prove readily extendable to the investigation of how our visual systems deal with the task of extracting socially relevant information from often uncertain, incomplete or ambiguous visual input to the perception of personal attributes from images of the face and body.…”