The Detection of Gaze Direction: A Stare-In-The-Crowd Effect

Abstract

A visual-search paradigm was used to explore the relative ease with which the direction of gaze can be detected. Straight-gaze stimuli were presented as targets within a variable number of distractors with left-averted or right-averted gaze. Reaction time in this case was compared with that when either the left-averted or right-averted gaze stimuli were the targets among distractors of the two remaining gaze directions. The data were examined for the existence of a search asymmetry favoring the straight-gaze targets. Such an asymmetry was found with stimuli that were realistically drawn renditions of pairs of human eyes, as well as with similar schematic stimuli representing pairs of human eyes. The asymmetry, however, was not found with geometric control stimuli, which also presented the critical feature in the central, the left-lateral, or the right-lateral position within the stimulus, but were not eyelike. It was also not found for schematic stimuli consisting of only one eye. It was concluded that the straight gaze direction is a special stimulus with eyelike stimuli, which the visual system is set up to process faster and with fewer errors than averted gaze directions. The results are discussed in terms of the evolutionary significance of the straight gaze direction.

Deviant gaze processing in children with autism: an ERP study

“…Their findings, which may indicate the delayed development of gaze processing in autism, are intriguing. But it is surprising they did not find any gazedirection effect in non-autistic participants, considering the sensitivity to the perceived eye gaze direction often found in other behavioral studies (e.g., Senju & Hasegawa, in press;von Grünau & Anston, 1995). It might be due to the use of passive viewing paradigm, rather than active detection or discrimination tasks usually used in behavioral studies.…”

Mutual eye gaze facilitates person categorization for typically developing children, but not for children with autism

“…Mutual eye gaze, in particular, serves to signal the likely flavor of a social interaction, be it nasty or nice, to initiate and regulate social communication, and to provide important information about the mental states of others (Nummenmaa & Calder, 2009). It is perhaps of no surprise, then, that adults are exquisitely sensitive to gaze direction (von Grünau & Anston, 1995), that such sensitivity emerges early in ontogenesis (Farroni, Mansfield, Lai, & Johnson, 2003), and that atypicalities in gaze processing are a defining feature of autism (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000), a developmental condition characterized by profound difficulties in social reciprocity and communication.…”

Dynamic Gaze Cueing Alters the Perceived Direction of Apparent Motion

“…For example, in a visual search task, a straight gaze direction among averted gaze directions is detected faster and with fewer errors than is an averted gaze among straight gaze directions (von Grünau & Anston, 1995). Until now, numerous studies have investigated how observers know where another person is looking (e.g., Anstis, Mayhew, & Morley, 1969;Cline, 1967;Gibson & Pick, 1963;Symons, Lee, Cedrone, & Nishimura, 2004;Todorović, 2006) and have demonstrated that observers discriminate the gaze direction of another person with high accuracy.…”