Gaze selection in complex social scenes

Abstract

A great deal of recent research has sought to understand the factors and neural systems that mediate the orienting of spatial attention to a gazed-at location. What have rarely been examined, however, are the factors that are critical to the initial selection of gaze information from complex visual scenes. For instance, is gaze prioritized relative to other possible body parts and objects within a scene? The present study springboards from the seminal work of Yarbus (1965/1967), who had originally examined participants’ scan paths while they viewed visual scenes containing one or more people. His work suggested to us that the selection of gaze information may depend on the task that is assigned to participants, the social content of the scene, and/or the activity level depicted within the scene. Our results show clearly that all of these factors can significantly modulate the selection of gaze information. Specifically, the selection of gaze was enhanced when the task was to describe the social attention within a scene, and when the social content and activity level in a scene were high. Nevertheless, it is also the case that participants always selected gaze information more than any other stimulus. Our study has broad implications for future investigations of social attention as well as resolving a number of longstanding issues that had undermined the classic original work of Yarbus.

Notes

¹It is worth noting that the routine preselection of gaze information may also have led researchers to overestimate the influence of gaze direction on the orienting of attention, at least within standard research paradigms. For instance, it has recently transpired that other directional cues, such as arrows (Ristic et al., 2002; Tipples, 2002) and the words “left” or “right” (Hommel, Pratt, Colzato, & Godijn, 2001), can produce rapid, reflexive shifts of attention that closely approximate (if not duplicate) the attention shift triggered by gaze. This raises the real possibility that many of the orienting effects to gaze direction that were initially attributed to gaze being a “special social cue” (e.g., Driver et al., 1999; Friesen & Kingstone, 1998) may have grossly overstated their case (see Gibson & Kingstone, 2006; Ristic, Wright, & Kingstone, 2006, for further considerations of this matter).