Neural correlates of the stare-in-the-crowd effect

Look at them and they will notice you: Distractor-independent attentional capture by direct gaze in change blindness

“…However, facial stimuli (Kikuchi et al, 2009;Lyyra, Mäkelä, et al, 2014;Ro et al, 2001) and their emotional expressions seem to form an exception, and our results suggest that gaze direction may also be implicitly represented in a manner that can exert a similar bottom-up influence speeding up recovery from change blindness. This is also in line with studies using interocular suppression (Akechi et al, 2014;Chen & Yeh, 2012;Stein et al, 2011) and studies using visual search (Conty et al, 2006;Doi et al, 2009;Senju et al, 2005;Shirama, 2012;Von Grünau & Anston, 1995). In visual search, however, the search advantage for direct gaze has been contested as being confounded by the attention-grabbing effect of the gaze directions of the distractor faces.…”

“…These processes also include attentional ones: direct gaze has been shown to attract and grab the perceiver's attention. In the visual search paradigm, detection times are shorter for deviant direct gaze targets among averted gaze distractors than for averted gaze targets among direct gaze distractors, a phenomenon dubbed the "stare-in-the-crowd" effect (Conty, Tijus, Hugueville, Coelho, & George, 2006;Doi, Ueda, & Shinohara, 2009;Senju, Hasegawa, & Tojo, 2005;Shirama, 2012;von Grünau & Anston, 1995). Moreover, even a task-irrelevant direct gaze facilitates visual search for facial expressions (Doi & Shinohara, 2013), and targets presented at the location of a direct gaze are detected faster than those presented at the location of averted gaze (Böckler, van der Wel, & Welsh, 2014;Miyazaki, Ichihara, Wake, & Wake, 2012).…”

Effects of peripheral eccentricity and head orientation on gaze discrimination

“…For instance, in visual search studies, direct gaze is discriminated faster and more accurately than averted gaze in a crowd of opposite-gaze distractors-a phenomenon known as the "stare-in-the-crowd effect." This effect has been shown using pairs of schematic eyes (von Grünau & Anston, 1995), photographs of three-quarter view faces (Senju et al, 2005; see also Doi & Ueda, 2007;Doi et al, 2009), or photographs of eye regions from deviated heads (Conty et al, 2006). The fact that this effect has been shown with deviated head views suggests that attention capture by direct gaze is not just due to the visual symmetry between the dark iris and white sclera of the eyes in front-view faces, but rather to the perception that the gaze is directed at the observer (Conty et al, 2006;Doi & Ueda, 2007;Doi et al, 2009;Senju et al, 2005; but see Shirama, 2012 for the suggestion that what drives the stare-in-thecrowd effect is the frontal view of the face).…”

“…As eccentricity increases and visual acuity decreases, perception of eye cues should become more difficult, and thus error rates and RTs should increase. Based on the visual search literature (e.g., Conty et al, 2006;Doi & Ueda, 2007;Doi et al, 2009;Senju et al, 2005;Shirama, 2012;von Grünau & Anston, 1995), we predicted that direct gaze faces would be discriminated faster and more accurately than averted gaze faces (across head orientations) in central vision, where gaze discrimination is accurate. Based on the gaze perception literature (e.g., Langton, 2000;Seyama & Nagayama, 2005;Itier et al, 2007aItier et al, , 2007bTodorović, 2009), we also predicted congruency effects between head and gaze directions, such that direct gaze discrimination should be fastest in frontal heads while that of averted gaze should be fastest in deviated heads.…”

Learning Gaze Direction Perception - An Investigation by Behavioral and Neurocomputational Approaches

“…In the two preliminary experiments reported in the present article, we attempted to investigate the ontogenesis of the well-documented characteristics of the human gaze direction perception that the head orientation information influences the perceived gaze direction (Gibson, & Pick, 1963;Langton, Honeyman, & Tessler, 2004;Doi & Ueda, 2007;Doi, Ueda, & Shinohara, 2009). In Experiment 1, the results indicated that that the face inversion impairs the influence of the head context, which lends support to the contention that the influence of the head orientation on the perceived gaze direction is mediated by the configural mode of face processing (Maurer et al, 2002).…”