Trajectories of social vision: Eye contact increases saccadic curvature

ABSTRACT

Saccades are known to deviate away from distractors, and the amplitude of this deviation seems to reflect the salience of these stimuli, as in the case of human faces. Here, we investigated whether eye contact can modulate attention allocation by examining saccadic curvature when faces with closed vs. open eyes act as distractors. In two experiments, participants were asked to perform a vertical saccade towards a symbolic target. At the same time, task-irrelevant faces with open or closed eyes (Experiments 1 and 2) and scrambled faces (Experiment 2) could appear leftwards or rightwards with respect to the ideal trajectory towards the target. Overall, a greater saccadic curvature was observed in response to faces with open eyes, as compared to the other two conditions. These results confirm that eye contact plays an important role in shaping attentional mechanisms and provide further evidence concerning the link between social vision and eye movements.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual attention
• social vision
• eye movements
• eye contact

Acknowledgements

We thank Casimir Ludwig and Iain Gilchrist for suggestions about the application of the curve-fitting method, Marco Bedini for assistance in data collection, and Luca Battaglini for technical advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Mario Dalmaso http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0199-7861

Luigi Castelli http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1472-4507

Giovanni Galfano http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5327-4062

Additional information

Funding

Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca MIUR (FIRB 2012) [grant number RBFR12F0BD] to Giovanni Galfano and Università degli Studi di Padova (Bando Giovani Ricercatori 2015 Assegno Senior) [grant number GRIC15QDDH] to Mario Dalmaso supported this work.