Humans Have an Expectation That Gaze Is Directed Toward Them

Abstract

SummaryMany animals use cues from another animal’s gaze to help distinguish friend from foe [1–3]. In humans, the direction of someone’s gaze provides insight into their focus of interest and state of mind [4] and there is increasing evidence linking abnormal gaze behaviors to clinical conditions such as schizophrenia and autism [5–11]. This fundamental role of another’s gaze is buoyed by the discovery of specific brain areas dedicated to encoding directions of gaze in faces [12–14]. Surprisingly, however, very little is known about how others’ direction of gaze is interpreted. Here we apply a Bayesian framework that has been successfully applied to sensory and motor domains [15–19] to show that humans have a prior expectation that other people’s gaze is directed toward them. This expectation dominates perception when there is high uncertainty, such as at night or when the other person is wearing sunglasses. We presented participants with synthetic faces viewed under high and low levels of uncertainty and manipulated the faces by adding noise to the eyes. Then, we asked the participants to judge relative gaze directions. We found that all participants systematically perceived the noisy gaze as being directed more toward them. This suggests that the adult nervous system internally represents a prior for gaze and highlights the importance of experience in developing our interpretation of another’s gaze.

A Bayesian approach to person perception

“…It has been suggested that, in the history of humans, misclassifying a man as female has generally proved to be potentially more dangerous than misclassifying a woman as male (Armann & Bülthoff, 2012). A similar ''better safe than sorry'' heuristic has also been invoked in the context of the bias for direct gaze (Mareschal et al, 2013b) and other social judgments (Haselton & Nettle, 2006;Johnson et al, 2012). Whenever judgments are made under uncertainty and the costs of errors are asymmetrical in this way, it has been argued that human decision making should be biased towards making less costly errors.…”

“…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.…”

“…horizontal gaze deviation) in a forced-choice task between stimuli differing in their uncertainty (e.g. Girshick et al, 2011;Mareschal et al, 2013b;Stocker & Simoncelli, 2006a). Specifically, in our psychophysical task we present two stimuli at different levels of uncertainty, r 1 and r 2 , associated with their respective sensory estimates.…”

“…A Bayesian framework has also been proposed in the context of social cognition and its disorders in conditions such as autism and schizophrenia (Fletcher & Frith, 2009;Hohwy & Palmer, 2014;Kilner, Friston, & Frith, 2007). 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).…”

Why and how to use virtual reality to study human social interaction: The challenges of exploring a new research landscape

“…For example, participants might be asked to judge emotion from pictures of faces (Ekman, Friesen, & Ellsworth, 1972) or to discriminate different directions of gaze (Mareschal, Calder, & Clifford, 2013). Such studies have provided valuable insights into the mechanisms of social perception, but still suffer from some problems.…”