The eyes have it! Reflexive orienting is triggered by nonpredictive gaze

Abstract

Normal subjects were presented with a simple line drawing of a face looking left, right, or straight ahead. A target letter F or T then appeared to the left or the right of the face. All subjects participated in target detection, localization, and identification response conditions. Although subjects were told that the line drawing's gaze direction (the cue) did not predict where the target would occur, response time in all three conditions was reliably faster when gaze was toward versus away from the target. This study provides evidence for covert, reflexive orienting to peripheral locations in response to uninformative gaze shifts presented at fixation. The implications for theories of social attention and visual orienting are discussed, and the brain mechanisms that may underlie this phenomenon are considered.A moment's introspection reveals that in everyday life, gaze shifts can provide a rich and complex source of social information. For instance, at a loud party one can communicate the desire to leave by simply "catching" a friend's eye and then looking toward the door. The use of gaze shift as a social cue would, ofcourse, have had many evolutionary advantages as well. For example, a sudden shift in gaze could signal the occurrence of crucial events in the environment, such as the approach of a predator or the presence of a food source, Given the wealth of information that gaze shifts can provide, it is not surprising to discover that lesion and single-cell recording studies with nonhuman primates indicate that specific brain areas are specialized for the processing of gaze information. For instance, in singlecell recording experiments with the macaque monkey, Perrett and his colleagues have found specific cells in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) that respond to particular orientations of both head and gaze (Perrett et aI., 1985). Similarly, Campbell, Heywood, Cowey, Regard, and Landis (1990) have found that STS lesions in the rhesus monkey impair gaze direction discrimination.Research with human infants suggests that the development of these specialized brain areas begins to affect behavior at a very young age. As early as 2 to 3 months, babies look preferentially at the eyes of a schematic face (Maurer, 1985), and by 3 months they are also able to discriminate changes in an adult's eye direction (Hains & Muir, 1996). In the second half of their 1st year, infants begin to show the ability to look in the same general direction as an adult's gaze and head tum. And by the age of 12 months, infants reliably look to where someone else is looking, regardless ofwhether a shift in gaze is accompanied by a head tum (Corkum & Moore, 1995; but see a recent study by Hood, Willen, & Driver, 1998, suggesting that infants as young as 10 weeks old orient to gaze shifts alone).The goal of the present study was to explore whether gaze shifts would produce shifts of attention in adults. Our manipulation was very simple, yet, as we will show, very powerful. We modified the standard Posner cuing paradigm (Posner, 1978(Po...

Attentional bias to angry faces using the dot-probe task? It depends when you look for it

“…Measuring the initial allocation of spatial attention earlier than 500ms would be in line with much research using other paradigms to study spatial attention (e.g. Posner, 1980;Langton & Bruce, 1999;Friesen & Kingstone, 1998).…”

Taking control of reflexive social attention

“…Participants were tested in one of three conditions. In the FACE condition (based on the original work of Friesen & Kingstone, 1998), participants were presented with a schematic face that gazed to the left or right of center. Target onset occurred 100-1000 ms after the face stimulus and was uncorrelated with gaze direction.…”

“…Friesen & Kingstone, 1998;Langton & Bruce, 1999). In the typical laboratory demonstration, a picture of a face looking left or right is projected onto a screen and observers are required to respond as quickly as possible to a target that appears beside the face.…”

“…First, it occurs rapidly, within a few hundred milliseconds after a gazing face is presented (e.g. Friesen & Kingstone, 1998). Second, it occurs even if eye direction is negatively correlated with where a target might to appear (e.g.…”

“…Some investigators have suggested, either explicitly or implicitly, that the effect is driven in a purely "bottom-up" fashion by cells in IT (e.g. Friesen & Kingstone, 1998;Kingstone, Friesen, & Gazzaniga, 2000). For instance, in an early study of the social orienting phenomenon (Driver et al, 1999) observers were shown gazing faces and informed that on most trials a target would appear at the location opposite to where the eyes were looking (e.g.…”