Searching for a Perceived Stare in the Crowd

Abstract

Gaze direction can be represented in terms not only of local-feature information (ie the location of the pupil in the eye socket), but also of an emergent property---whether the perceived gaze direction is straight or averted. To examine whether this emergent property is preferentially accessed when searching for an oddly directed gaze, we experimentally manipulated the local-feature information and the emergent property independently, in order to investigate the influences of both types of information on visual searches for an oddly directed gaze. We found that the primary determinant of search efficiency was not the local-feature information of eye region, but the emergent property--the perceived direction of the gaze. This finding is consistent with the idea that important social signals are recognised primarily by their emergent properties.

Effects of peripheral eccentricity and head orientation on gaze discrimination

“…For deviated heads, faster RTs for DG than AG faces were also seen for the centred position, when participants were directly fixated on the target. This result is in line with the stare-in-thecrowd effect literature supporting a facilitation of direct gaze processing (Conty et al, 2006;Doi & Ueda, 2007;Doi et al, 2009;Senju et al, 2005;Shirama, 2012;von Grünau & Anston, 1995). Thus, even in this non-visual search paradigm, direct gaze processing was facilitated compared to averted gaze processing regardless of head orientation, within foveal vision.…”

“…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.…”

Neural bases of eye and gaze processing: The core of social cognition

“…By attracting attention, direct gaze would increase the disengagement time from the central face before orienting attention to the target location. This attention grabbing effect of direct gaze is also supported by visual search paradigms where staring eyes embedded in an array of averted-eyes stimuli are detected better and faster than averted eyes in arrays of staring eyes (Doi and Ueda, 2007;von Grünau and Anston, 1995). This "stare-in-a-crowd-effect" was confirmed in a recent study using more naturalistic stimuli, but only when the faces from which the eye regions were extracted were in 3/4-view (Conty et al, 2006).…”

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).…”