Responding to social and symbolic extrafoveal cues: cue shape trumps biological relevance

The Influence of Competing Social and Symbolic Cues on Observers' Gaze Behaviour

The effects of social (eye gaze, pointing gestures) and symbolic (arrows) cues on observers' attention are often studied by presenting such cues in isolation and at fixation. Here, we extend this work by embedding cues in natural scenes. Participants were presented with a single cue (Experiment 1) or a combination of cues (Experiment 2) embedded in natural scenes and were asked to 'simply look at the images' while their eye movements were recorded to assess the effects of the cues on (overt) attention. Single-gaze and pointing cues were fixated for longer than arrows but at the cost of shorter dwell times on the cued object. When presented together, gaze and pointing cues were fixated faster and for longer than simultaneously presented arrows. Attention to the cued object depended on the combination of cues and whether both cues were directed towards or away from the target object. Together, the findings confirm earlier observations that people attract attention more strongly than arrows but that arrows more strongly direct attention.

Reversing the reversed congruency effect: directional salience overrides social significance in a spatial Stroop task

In a spatial Stroop task, eye-gaze targets produce a reversed congruency effect (RCE) with faster responses when gaze direction and location are incongruent than congruent. On the other hand, non-social directional targets (e.g., arrows) elicit a spatial Stroop effect (SSE). The present study examined whether other social stimuli, such as head orientation, trigger the RCE. Participants judged the target direction of the head or the gaze while ignoring its location. While the gaze target replicated the RCE, the head target produced the SSE. Moreover, the head target facilitated the overall responses relative to the gaze target. These results suggest that the head, a salient directional feature, overrides the social significance. The RCE may be specific to gaze stimuli, not to social stimuli in general. The head and gaze information differentially affect our attentional mechanisms and enable us to bring about smooth social interactions.

Focused attention: its key role in gaze and arrow cues for determining where attention is directed

Others' gaze direction and traffic arrow signal lights play significant roles in guiding observers' attention in daily life. Previous studies have shown that gaze and arrow cues can direct attention to the cued location. However, it is ambiguous where gaze and arrow cues guide attention: the cued location or a broader cued region. Therefore, the present study adopted a primary cue-target task and manipulated possible target locations to explore this issue. The results revealed that due to the different physical characteristics of non-predictive gaze and arrow cues, physically unfocused-pointing gaze cues guided attention to a broader cued region, whereas focused-pointing arrow cues guided attention to the exact cued location. Furthermore, gaze cues could also direct attention to the exact cued location when observers' attention was focused in a top-down manner (with highly predictive probability). These findings suggest that where gaze and arrow cues direct attention depends on whether observers' attention is focused by the cues, either in a bottom-up or top-down manner. Accordingly, a preliminary framework called the "Focused-Diffused Attentional Orienting Model" is proposed to explain how gaze and arrow cues direct humans' attention. The present study enhances our understanding of human attentional orienting systems from a behavioral perspective.

Combining social cues in attention: Looking at gaze, head, and pointing cues

Social cues bias covert spatial attention. In most previous work the impact of different social cues, such as the gaze, head, and pointing cue, has been investigated using separated cues or making one cue explicitly task relevant in response-interference tasks. In the present study we created a novel cartoon figure in which unpredictive gaze and head and pointing cues could be combined to study their impact on spatial attention. In Experiment 1, gaze and pointing cues were either presented alone or together. When both cues were present, they were always directed to the same location. In Experiment 2, gaze and pointing cues were either directed to the same location (aligned) or directed to different locations (conflicted). Experiment 3 was like Experiment 2, except that the pointing cue was tested alongside a head-direction cue. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the effect of the gaze cue was reliably smaller than the pointing cue, and an aligned gaze cue did not have an additive benefit for performance. In Experiments 2 and 3, performance was determined by the pointing cue, regardless of where they eyes were looking, or the head was directed. The present results demonstrated a strong dominance of the pointing cue over the other cues. The child-friendly stimuli present a versatile way to study the impact of the combination of social cues, which may further benefit developmental research in social attention, and research in populations whose members might have atypical social attention.

Does agreement mean accuracy? Evaluating glance annotation in naturalistic driving data

Naturalistic driving studies often make use of cameras to monitor driver behavior. To analyze the resulting video images, human annotation is often adopted. These annotations then serve as the 'gold standard' to train and evaluate automated computer vision algorithms, even though it is uncertain how accurate human annotation is. In this study, we provide a first evaluation of glance direction annotation by comparing instructed, actual glance direction of truck drivers with annotated direction. Findings indicate that while for some locations high annotation accuracy is achieved, for most locations accuracy is well below 50%. Higher accuracy can be obtained by clustering these locations, but this also leads to reduced detail of the annotation, suggesting that decisions to use clustering should take into account the purpose of the annotation. The data also show that high agreement between annotators does not guarantee high accuracy. We argue that the accuracy of annotation needs to be verified experimentally more often.

Eye movements while judging faces for trustworthiness and dominance

Past studies examining how people judge faces for trustworthiness and dominance have suggested that they use particular facial features (e.g. mouth features for trustworthiness, eyebrow and cheek features for dominance ratings) to complete the task. Here, we examine whether eye movements during the task reflect the importance of these features. We here compared eye movements for trustworthiness and dominance ratings of face images under three stimulus configurations: Small images (mimicking large viewing distances), large images (mimicking face to face viewing), and a moving window condition (removing extrafoveal information). Whereas first area fixated, dwell times, and number of fixations depended on the size of the stimuli and the availability of extrafoveal vision, and varied substantially across participants, no clear task differences were found. These results indicate that gaze patterns for face stimuli are highly individual, do not vary between trustworthiness and dominance ratings, but are influenced by the size of the stimuli and the availability of extrafoveal vision.

When do arrows start to compete? A developmental mouse-tracking study

Recent work in adults has suggested that the strength of social and symbolic cues not presented at fixation (but allowing eye movements to the cue) may be determined less by their biological relevance and more by the distinctiveness of the shape of the cue. The present study examines whether these results extend to children, who may differ in their relative exposure to symbolic cues (arrows) compared to social cues. Children aged 3 to 11 were presented with congruent or incongruent pairs of cues (line drawings of gazing eyes, pointing hands, and arrows) and were asked to indicate the direction of the target cue (indicated at the start of the block) by moving the mouse towards the response box indicating its direction. Results show a similar advantage for arrows and pointing hands in young children as previously found in adults, suggesting that cue shape trumps biological relevance for cues away from fixation from an early age.

Can Gaze-Contingent Mirror-Feedback from Unfamiliar Faces alter Self-Recognition?

This study focuses on learning of the self, by examining how human observers update internal representations of their own face. For this purpose, we present a novel gaze-contingent paradigm, in which an onscreen face mimics observers’ own eye-gaze behaviour (in the congruent condition), moves its eyes in different directions to that of the observers (incongruent condition), or remains static and unresponsive (neutral condition). Across three experiments, the mimicry of the onscreen face did not affect observers’ perceptual self-representations. However, this paradigm influenced observers’ reports of their own face. This effect was such that observers felt the onscreen face to be their own and that, if the onscreen gaze had moved on its own accord, observers expected their own eyes to move too. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Building Computer-Based Experiments in Psychology without Programming Skills

Research in Psychology usually requires to build and run experiments. However, although this task has required scripting, recent computer tools based on graphical interfaces offer new opportunities in this field for researchers with non-programming skills. The purpose of this study is to illustrate and provide a comparative overview of two of the main free open source "point and click" software packages for building and running experiments in Psychology: PsychoPy and OpenSesame. Recommendations for their potential use are further discussed.