You look where I look! Effect of gaze cues on overt and covert attention in misdirection

Abstract

We designed a magic trick in which misdirection was used to orchestrate observers’ attention in order to prevent them from detecting the to-be-concealed event. By experimentally manipulating the magician's gaze direction we investigated the role that gaze cues have in attentional orienting, independently of any low level features. Participants were significantly less likely to detect the to-be-concealed event if the misdirection was supported by the magician's gaze, thus demonstrating that the gaze plays an important role in orienting people's attention. Moreover, participants spent less time looking at the critical hand when the magician's gaze was used to misdirect their attention away from the hand. Overall, the magician's face, and in particular the eyes, accounted for a large proportion of the fixations. The eyes were popular when the magician was looking towards the observer; once he looked towards the actions and objects being manipulated, participants typically fixated the gazed-at areas. Using a highly naturalistic paradigm using a dynamic display we demonstrate gaze following that is independent of the low level features of the scene.

Keywords:

• Covert attention
• Eye movements
• Gaze cueing
• Gaze following
• Overt attention
• Social attention

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Wolfson Research Institute, University of Durham. We also thank Daniel Smilek, Greg Zelinsky, and James Brockmole for their helpful comments.

Notes

¹In the magic literature the term “effect” refers to what the spectator sees, whilst method describes how the trick is done (Lamont & Wiseman, 1999).

²In the context of this analysis, the term fixation will be used rather loosely, whereby fixations refer to gaze coordinates at each sample.