The eye contact effect: mechanisms and development

Seeing eye-to-eye: Social gaze interactions influence gaze direction identification

We tested whether gaze direction identification of individual faces can be modulated by prior social gaze encounters. In two experiments, participants first completed a joint-gaze learning task using a saccade/antisaccade paradigm. Participants would encounter some ‘joint-gaze faces’ that would consistently look at the participants saccade goal before participants looked there (Experiment 1) or would follow the participants gaze to the target (Experiment 2). ‘Non-joint-gaze faces’ would consistently look in the opposite direction. Participants then completed a second task in which they judged the gaze direction of the faces they had previously encountered. Participants were less likely to erroneously report faces with slightly deviated gaze as looking directly at them if the face had previously never engaged in joint gaze with them. However, this bias was only present when those faces had looked first (Experiment 1) and not when the faces looked after participants (Experiment 2). Comparing these data with gaze identification responses of a control group that did not complete any joint-gaze learning phase revealed that the difference in gaze identification in Experiment 1 is likely driven by a lowering of direct gaze bias in response to non-joint-gaze faces. Thus, previous joint-gaze experiences can affect gaze direction judgements at an identity-specific level. However, this modulation may rely on the socio-cognitive information available from viewing other’s initiation behaviours, especially when they fail to engage in social contact.

Eye tracking in an everyday environment reveals the interpersonal distance that affords infant-parent gaze communication

The unique morphology of human eyes enables gaze communication at various ranges of interpersonal distance. Although gaze communication contributes to infants' social development, little is known about how infant-parent distance affects infants' visual experience in daily gaze communication. The present study conducted longitudinal observations of infant-parent face-to-face interactions in the home environment as 5 infants aged from 10 to 15.5 months. Using head-mounted eye trackers worn by parents, we evaluated infants' daily visual experience of 3138 eye contact scenes recorded from the infants' second-person perspective. The results of a hierarchical Bayesian statistical analysis suggest that certain levels of interpersonal distance afforded smooth interaction with eye contact. Eye contacts were not likely to be exchanged when the infant and parent were too close or too far apart. The number of continuing eye contacts showed an inverse U-shaped pattern with interpersonal distance, regardless of whether the eye contact was initiated by the infant or the parent. However, the interpersonal distance was larger when the infant initiated the eye contact than when the parent initiated it, suggesting that interpersonal distance affects the infant's and parent's social look differently. Overall, the present study indicates that interpersonal distance modulates infant-parent gaze communication.

Strange-face illusions during eye-to-eye gazing in dyads: specific effects on derealization, depersonalization and dissociative identity

Experimentally induced strange-face illusions can be perceived when two individuals look at each other in the eyes under low illumination for about 10 minutes. This task of subject-other eye-to-eye gazing produces the following perceptions by the subject: (i) mild to huge deformations and color/shape changes of face and facial features; (ii) lifeless, unmoving faces and immaterial presences akin to out-of-body experiences; (iii) pseudo-hallucinations, enlightened 'idealized' faces and personalities - rather than the other's actual face. Dissociative phenomena seem to be involved, whereas the effects of non-pathological dissociation on strange-face illusions have not yet been directly investigated. In the present study, dissociative perceptions and strange-face illusions were measured through self-report questionnaires on a large sample (N = 90) of healthy young individuals. Results of correlation and factor analyses suggest that strange-face illusions can involve, respectively: (i) strange-face illusions correlated to derealization; (ii) strange-face illusions correlated to depersonalization; and (iii) strange-face illusions of identity, which are supposedly correlated to identity dissociation. The findings support the separation between detachment and compartmentalization in dissociative processes. Effects of gender show that strange-face illusions are more frequent in men with respect to women if dyads are composed of individuals of different-gender. Furthermore, drawings of strange-faces, which were perceived by portrait artists in place the others' faces, allowed a direct illustration of examples of dissociative identities. Findings are discussed in relation to the three-level model of self-referential processing.

Object's symmetry alters spatial perspective-taking processes

Spatial perspective-taking (SPT) refers to one's ability to identify or understand the location of a target relative to another viewpoint, which could be specified by a human-like agent or a reference object (e.g., a chair). Previous studies have shown that SPT is characterized by different processes depending on whether one is required to make a left/right or front/behind judgment. An object's shape, however, may also account for the different processes, as previous studies typically used reference objects that were left-right symmetrical and front-back asymmetrical (e.g., human figures, dolls, or chairs), thus confounding effects of judgment direction and effects of objects' shape. To address this issue, we manipulated objects' shape (symmetrical or asymmetrical about front-back or left-right) independently of judgment direction (i.e., left/right or front/behind) and compared participants' efficacy of such judgments. Our results showed that egocentric transformations were used more frequently for judgments orthogonal to the object's symmetry plane than for judgments orthogonal to the object's asymmetry plane, whereas the inverse was true for mental scanning. Notably, these tendencies were observed regardless of whether the judgment was about left/right or front/behind. Nonetheless, egocentric transformations were found to be more difficult to apply to the front/behind judgments than to the left/right judgments. We also found that this difficulty was alleviated by rich imagination. Furthermore, we found that participants tended to erroneously perceive a front-back symmetrical human-like object as facing them, even when it was actually facing away from them (facing bias). This in turn forced the participants to conduct unnecessary egocentric transformations. Overall, our findings demonstrated that objects' symmetry dramatically influenced SPT processes.

I’m Doing Better on My Own: Social Inhibition in Vocabulary Learning in Adults

Vocabulary learning is better achieved by children facing a teacher than when presented to the same teacher through video (so-called “video deficit” effect), which has significant implications for toddlers’ education. Since millions of adults also learn new vocabulary when acquiring a second language (L2), it is important to explore whether adults suffer from “video deficit” effects, as children do. In the present study, we report two experiments in which Spanish native late learners of English were involved in a vocabulary learning task. In Experiment 1, participants had to learn English (L2) labels associated to real objects. In Experiment 2, participants had to learn English (L2) and Spanish (L1) labels associated to novel objects. In both experiments, vocabulary learning was divided into three conditions: In the NoFace condition, participants were presented with the objects and their auditory labels, through video. In the Video condition, a teacher was showing the objects and uttering their names, through video. The Live condition was equivalent, except that the teacher was facing the participants in the room. Each condition was followed by a recall test. Better learning in Video compared to NoFace condition revealed that adults benefit from the teacher’s display with direct gaze, confirming the fundamental role of face display with direct gaze in social communication in adults. Interestingly, adults learned better through Video than in the Live condition. Those results were obtained in L2 vocabulary learning in both Experiments 1 and 2, and also generalized to native language in Experiment 2. We argue that adults suffer from social inhibition, meaning that they perform worse when in the presence of another person during task performance. In sum, we show that video-mediated teaching might not be detrimental for adults learning new vocabulary lists, as it is the case for young children. These results might have important implications for pedagogical programs targeting adults’ second language vocabulary learning, since proper acquisition of vocabulary list can be achieved through video including a teacher’s display.

Eye Contact Is a Two-Way Street: Arousal Is Elicited by the Sending and Receiving of Eye Gaze Information

Research shows that arousal is significantly enhanced while participants make eye contact with a live person compared to viewing a picture of direct or averted gaze. Recent research has pointed toward the potential for social interaction as a possible driving force behind the arousal enhancement. That is, eye gaze is not only a signal perceived but also a signal sent out in order to communicate with others. This study aimed to test this by having dyads engage in eye contact and averted gaze naturally, while wearing sunglasses, and while blindfolded; such that the gaze signals were clear, degraded, and blocked, respectively. Autonomic nervous system arousal was measured via skin conductance response and level. The results showed that dyads exhibited the highest degree of arousal (increased skin conductance) while making eye contact (send/receive) compared to send-only or receive-only gaze trials; however, this was only the case if eye contact was clear. Once gaze information became degraded (by sunglasses or blindfold), arousal significantly decreased and was no longer modulated by the sending and receiving of gaze. Therefore, the arousal enhancement observed during eye contact is not only caused by receiving gaze signals (the focus of previous research) and should be more accurately attributed to the subtle interplay between sending and receiving gaze signals.

Investigating Eye Contact Effect on People's Name Retrieval in Normal Aging and in Alzheimer's Disease

Difficulty in recalling people's name is one of the most universally experienced changes in old age and would also constitute one of the earliest symptom of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Direct gaze, i.e., another individual's gaze directed to the observer that leads to eye contact, has been shown to improve memory for faces and concomitant verbal information. Here, we investigated whether this effect extends to memory for Face-Name association and can thus enhance names' retrieval in normal aging and in AD, at the early stage of the disease. Twenty AD patients, 20 older adults and 25 young adults participated in our study. Subjects were presented with faces displaying either direct or averted gaze in association with a name presented orally. They were then asked to perform a surprise recognition test for each pair of stimuli, in a sequential fashion (i.e., first categorizing a face as old or new and then associating a name using a forced-choice procedure). Results showed that direct gaze does not improve memory for Face-Name association. Yet, we observed an overall direct gaze memory effect over faces and names independently, across our populations, showing that eye contact enhances the encoding of concomitantly presented stimuli. Our results are the first empirical evidence that eye contact benefits memory throughout the course of aging and lead to better delimit the actual power of eye contact on memory.

Socially Communicative Eye Contact and Gender Affect Memory

Because of their value as a socially communicative cue, researchers have strived to understand how the gaze of other people influences a variety of cognitive processes. Recent work in social attention suggests that the use of images of people in laboratory studies, as a substitute for real people, may not effectively test socially communicative aspects of eye gaze. As attention affects many other cognitive processes, it is likely that social attention between real individuals could also affect other cognitive processes, such as memory. However, from previous work alone, it is unclear whether, and if so how, socially communicative eye gaze affects memory. The present studies test the assumption that socially communicative aspects of eye gaze may impact memory by manipulating the eye gaze of a live speaker in the context of a traditional recognition paradigm used frequently in the laboratory. A female (Experiment 1) or male (Experiment 2) investigator read words aloud and varied whether eye contact was, or was not, made with a participant. With both female and male investigators, eye contact improved word recognition only for female participants and hindered word recognition in male participants. When a female investigator prolonged their eye contact (Experiment 3) to provide a longer opportunity to both observe and process the investigator's eye gaze, the results replicated the findings from Experiments 1 and 2. The findings from Experiments 1-3 suggest that females interpret and use the investigator's eye gaze differently than males. When key aspects from the previous experiments were replicated in a noncommunicative situation (i.e., when a video of a speaker is used instead of a live speaker; Experiment 4), the memory effects observed previously in response to eye gaze were eliminated. Together, these studies suggest that it is the socially communicative aspects of eye gaze from a real person that influence memory. The findings reveal the importance of using social cues that are communicative in nature (e.g., real people) when studying the relationship between social attention and memory.

Infants rapidly detect human faces in complex naturalistic visual scenes

Infants respond preferentially to faces and face-like stimuli from birth, but past research has typically presented faces in isolation or amongst an artificial array of competing objects. In the current study infants aged 3- to 12-months viewed a series of complex visual scenes; half of the scenes contained a person, the other half did not. Infants rapidly detected and oriented to faces in scenes even when they were not visually salient. Although a clear developmental improvement was observed in face detection and interest, all infants displayed sensitivity to the presence of a person in a scene, by displaying eye movements that differed quantifiably across a range of measures when viewing scenes that either did or did not contain a person. We argue that infant's face detection capabilities are ostensibly "better" with naturalistic stimuli and artificial array presentations used in previous studies have underestimated performance.

Pupils say more than a thousand words: Pupil size reflects how observed actions are interpreted

Humans attend to others' facial expressions and body language to better understand their emotions and predict goals and intentions. The eyes and its pupils reveal important social information. Because pupil size is beyond voluntary control yet reflective of a range of cognitive and affective processes, pupils in principal have the potential to convey whether others' actions are interpreted correctly or not. Here, we measured pupil size while participants observed video-clips showing reach-to-grasp arm movements. Expressors in the video-clips were playing a board game and moved a dowel to a new position. Participants' task was to decide whether the dowel was repositioned with the intention to be followed up by another move of the same expressor (personal intention) or whether the arm movement carried the implicit message that expressor's turn was over (social intention). Replicating earlier findings, results showed that participants recognized expressors' intentions on the basis of their arm kinematics. Results further showed that participants' pupil size was larger when observing actions reflecting personal compared to social intentions. Most interestingly, before participants indicated how they interpreted the observed actions by choosing to press one of two keys (corresponding to the personal or social intention), their pupils within a split second, had already given away how they interpreted the expressor's movement. In sum, this study underscores the importance of nonverbal behavior in helping social messages get across quickly. Revealing how actions are interpreted, pupils may provide additional feedback for effective social interactions.

Demystifying infant vocal imitation: The roles of mouth looking and speaker's gaze

Vocal imitation plays a fundamental role in human language acquisition from infancy. Little is known, however, about how infants imitate other's sounds. We focused on three factors: (a) whether infants receive information from upright faces, (b) the infant's observation of the speaker's mouth and (c) the speaker directing their gaze towards the infant. We recorded the eye movements of 6-month-olds who participated in experiments watching videos of a speaker producing vowel sounds. We found that an infants' tendency to vocally imitate such videos increased as a function of (a) seeing upright rather than inverted faces, (b) their increased looking towards the speaker's mouth and (c) whether the speaker directed their gaze towards, rather than away from infants. These latter findings are consistent with theories of motor resonance and natural pedagogy respectively. New light has been shed on the cues and underlying mechanisms linking infant speech perception and production.

Access to awareness of direct gaze is related to autistic traits

BACKGROUND

The atypical processing of eye contact is a characteristic hallmark of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The severity of these symptoms, however, is thought to lie on a continuum that extends into the typical population. While behavioural evidence shows that differences in social cognitive tasks in typically developed (TD) adults are related to the levels of autistic-like traits, it remains unknown whether such a relation exists for the sensitivity to direct gaze.

METHODS

In two experiments, we measured reaction times to detect the faces with direct and averted gaze, suppressed from awareness, i.e. the access to awareness. In experiment 1, we tested N = 19 clinically diagnosed adults with ASD and N = 22 TD matched controls, while in experiment 2, we tested an independent sample of N = 20 TD adults.

RESULTS

In line with the literature, experiment 1 showed preferential processing of direct gaze in the TD group but not in the ASD group. Importantly, we found a linear relationship in both experiments between the levels of autistic traits within the groups of TD participants and their sensitivity to direct gaze: with increasing autistic characteristics, there was a decrease in sensitivity to direct gaze.

CONCLUSION

These results provide the first evidence that differences in gaze processing and the sensitivity to direct gaze are already present in individuals with subclinical levels of autistic traits. Furthermore, they lend support to the continuum view of the disorder and could potentially help in an earlier diagnosis of individuals at high risk for autism.

Are eyes special? Electrophysiological and behavioural evidence for a dissociation between eye-gaze and arrows attentional mechanisms

It has been proposed that attention triggered by eye-gaze may represent a unique attentional process, different from that triggered by non-social stimuli such as arrows. To investigate this issue, in the present study we compared the temporal dynamics of the conflict processing triggered by eye-gaze and arrow stimuli. We investigated the electrophysiological activity during a task in which participants were required to identify the direction of laterally presented eye-gaze or arrow targets. Opposite behavioural effects were observed: while arrows produced the typical effect, with faster responses when they were congruent with their position, eye-gaze targets produced a reversed effect with faster responses when they were incongruent. Event-related potentials showed common and dissociable congruency modulation: whereas eye-gaze and arrows showed similar effects on earlier ERP components (P1 and N1), they led to opposite effects in later components such as N2 and P3. This represents the first electrophysiological demonstration of both early shared and later dissociable congruency effects for eye-gaze and arrow stimuli.

Revisiting intersubjective action-effect binding: No evidence for social moderators

Effect-based accounts of human action control have recently highlighted the possibility of representing one's own actions in terms of anticipated changes in the behavior of social interaction partners. In contrast to action effects that pertain to the agent's body or the agent's physical environment, social action effects have been proposed to come with peculiarities inherent to their social nature. Here, we revisit the currently most prominent demonstration of such a peculiarity: the role of eye contact for action-effect learning in social contexts (Sato & Itakura, 2013, Cognition, 127, 383-390). In contrast to the previous demonstration of action-effect learning, a conceptual and a direct replication both yielded evidence for the absence of action-effect learning in the proposed design, irrespective of eye contact. Bayesian statistics supported this claim by demonstrating evidence in favor of the null hypothesis of no effect. These results suggest a limited generalizability of the original findings-for example, due to limitations that are inherent in the proposed study design or due to cultural differences.

Adults imitate to send a social signal

Humans frequently imitate each other's actions with high fidelity, and different reasons have been proposed for why they do so. Here we test the hypothesis that imitation can act as a social signal, with imitation occurring with greater fidelity when a participant is being watched. In a preregistered study, 30 pairs of naïve participants played an augmented-reality game involving moving blocks in space. We compared imitation fidelity between trials where the leader watched the followers' action, and trials where the leader did not watch. Followers imitated the trajectory height demonstrated by the leader, and critically, the strength of this correlation was greater in trials where the follower knew the leader was watching them. This suggests that followers spontaneously used imitation as a social signal in a nonverbal interaction task, supporting socio-communicative hypotheses of imitation.

The Role of Eye Gaze During Natural Social Interactions in Typical and Autistic People

Social interactions involve complex exchanges of a variety of social signals, such as gaze, facial expressions, speech and gestures. Focusing on the dual function of eye gaze, this review explores how the presence of an audience, communicative purpose and temporal dynamics of gaze allow interacting partners to achieve successful communication. First, we focus on how being watched modulates social cognition and behavior. We then show that the study of interpersonal gaze processing, particularly gaze temporal dynamics, can provide valuable understanding of social behavior in real interactions. We propose that the Interpersonal Gaze Processing model, which combines both sensing and signaling functions of eye gaze, provides a framework to make sense of gaze patterns in live interactions. Finally, we discuss how autistic individuals process the belief in being watched and interpersonal dynamics of gaze, and suggest that systematic manipulation of factors modulating gaze signaling can reveal which aspects of social eye gaze are challenging in autism.

The influence of top-down modulation on the processing of direct gaze

Gaze or eye contact is one of the most important nonverbal social cues, which is fundamental to human social interactions. To achieve real time and dynamic face-to-face communication, our brain needs to process another person's gaze direction rapidly and without explicit instruction. In order to explain the fast and spontaneous processing of direct gaze, the fast-track modulator model was proposed. Here, we review recent developments in gaze processing research in the last decade to extend the fast-track modulator model. In particular, we propose that task demand or top-down modulation could play a more crucial role at gaze processing than formerly assumed. We suggest that under different task demands, top-down modulation can facilitate or interfere with the direct gaze effects for early visual processing. The proposed modification of the model extends the role of task demand and its implication on the direct gaze effect, as well as the need to better control for top-down processing in order to better disentangle the role of top-down and bottom-up processing on the direct gaze effect. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition Psychology > Perception and Psychophysics Neuroscience > Cognition.

Do Beliefs About Whether Others Can See Modulate Social Seeking in Autism?

Autistic people process gaze differently than typical people, but it is not yet clear if these differences lie in the processing of eye-shapes or the belief in whether others can see (perceptual mentalizing). We aimed to investigate whether these two models of gaze processing modulate social seeking in typical and autistic adults. We measured preferences of participants to view videos of an actress with visible or hidden eyes, who can or cannot see out. While typical participants preferred videos where the actress can see through and has visible eyes, autistic people showed no preference for these videos. These findings are discussed in the context of perceptual mentalizing and the social motivation theory of autism.

Responding to joint attention bids in schizophrenia: An interactive eye-tracking study

This study investigated social cognition in schizophrenia using a virtual reality paradigm to capture the dynamic processes of evaluating and responding to eye gaze as an intentional communicative cue. A total of 21 patients with schizophrenia and 21 age-, gender-, and IQ-matched healthy controls completed an interactive computer game with an on-screen avatar that participants believed was controlled by an off-screen partner. On social trials, participants were required to achieve joint attention by correctly interpreting and responding to gaze cues. Participants also completed non-social trials in which they responded to an arrow cue within the same task context. While patients and controls took equivalent time to process communicative intent from gaze shifts, patients made significantly more errors than controls when responding to the directional information conveyed by gaze, but not arrow, cues. Despite no differences in response times to gaze cues between groups, patients were significantly slower than controls when responding to arrow cues. This is the opposite pattern of results previously observed in autistic adults using the same task and suggests that, despite general impairments in attention orienting or oculomotor control, patients with schizophrenia demonstrate a facilitation effect when responding to communicative gaze cues. Findings indicate a hyper-responsivity to gaze cues of communicative intent in schizophrenia. The possible effects of self-referential biases when evaluating gaze direction are discussed, as are clinical implications.

Physiological arousal predicts gaze following in infants

According to the natural pedagogy theory, infant gaze following is based on an understanding of the communicative intent of specific ostensive cues. However, it has remained unclear how eye contact affects this understanding and why it induces gaze following behaviour. In this study, we examined infant arousal in different gaze following contexts and whether arousal levels during eye contact predict gaze following. Twenty-five infants, ages 9-10 months participated in this study. They watched a video of an actress gazing towards one of two objects and then either looking directly into the camera to make eye contact or not showing any communicative intent. We found that eye contact led to an elevation in the infants' heart rates (HRs) and that HR during eye contact was predictive of later gaze following. Furthermore, increases in HR predicted gaze following whether it was accompanied by communicative cues or not. These findings suggest that infant gaze following behaviour is associated with both communicative cues and physiological arousal.

Eye gaze as a means of giving and seeking information during musical interaction

During skilled music ensemble performance, a multi-layered network of interaction processes allows musicians to negotiate common interpretations of ambiguously-notated music in real-time. This study investigated the conditions that encourage visual interaction during duo performance. Duos recorded performances of a new piece before and after a period of rehearsal. Mobile eye tracking and motion capture were used in combination to map uni- and bidirectional eye gaze patterns. Musicians watched each other more during temporally-unstable passages than during regularly-timed passages. They also watched each other more after rehearsal than before. Duo musicians may seek visual interaction with each other primarily, but not exclusively, when coordination is threatened by temporal instability. Visual interaction increases as musicians become familiar with the piece, suggesting that they visually monitor each other once a shared interpretation of the piece is established. Visual monitoring of co-performers' movements and attention may facilitate feelings of engagement and high-level creative collaboration.

Attention to the face is characterised by a difficult to inhibit first fixation to the eyes

The eyes are preferentially attended over other facial features and recent evidence suggests this bias is difficult to suppress. To further examine the automatic and volitional nature of this bias for eye information, we used a novel prompting face recognition paradigm in 41 adults and measured the location of their first fixations, overall dwell time and behavioural responses. First, patterns of eye gaze were measured during a free-viewing forced choice face recognition paradigm. Second, the task was repeated but with prompts to look to either the eyes or the mouth. Participants showed significantly more first fixations to the eyes than mouth, both when prompted to look at the eyes and when prompted to look at the mouth. The pattern of looking to the eyes when prompted was indistinguishable from the unprompted condition in which participants were free to look where they chose. Notably, the dwell time data demonstrated that the eye bias did not persist over the entire presentation period. Our results suggest a difficult-to-inhibit bias to initially orient to the eyes, which is superseded by volitional, top-down control of eye gaze. Further, the amount of looking to the eyes is at a maximum level spontaneously and cannot be enhanced by explicit instructions.

Facial Attribute Recognition by Recurrent Learning With Visual Fixation

This paper presents a recurrent learning-based facial attribute recognition method that mimics human observers' visual fixation. The concentrated views of a human observer while focusing and exploring parts of a facial image over time are generated and fed into a recurrent network. The network makes a decision concerning facial attributes based on the features gleaned from the observer's visual fixations. Experiments on facial expression, gender, and age datasets show that applying visual fixation to recurrent networks improves recognition rates significantly. The proposed method not only outperforms state-of-the-art recognition methods based on static facial features, but also those based on dynamic facial features.

Selected Principles of Pankseppian Affective Neuroscience

In the early nineties of the twentieth century Jaak Panksepp coined the term "Affective Neuroscience" (AN) today being accepted as a unique research area in cross-species brain science. By means of (i) electrical stimulation, (ii) pharmacological challenges, and (iii) brain lesions of vertebrate brains (mostly mammalian), Panksepp carved out seven primary emotional systems called SEEKING, CARE, PLAY, and LUST on the positive side, whereas FEAR, SADNESS, and ANGER belong to the negative affects. Abundant research into human clinical applications has supported the hypothesis that imbalances in these ancient primary emotional systems are strongly linked to psychiatric disorders such as depression. The present paper gives a concise overview of Panksepp's main ideas. It gives an historical overview of the development of Panksepp's AN thinking. It touches not only areas of neuroscience, but also shows how AN has been applied to other research fields such as personality psychology. Finally, the present work gives a brief overview of the main ideas of AN.

Direct Gaze Partially Overcomes Hemispatial Neglect and Captures Spatial Attention

Direct gaze has been shown to be a particularly important social cue, being preferentially processed even when unconsciously perceived. Results from several visual search tasks further suggest that direct gaze modulates attention, showing a faster orientation to faces perceived as looking toward us. The present study aimed to analyze putative modulation of spatial attention by eye gaze direction in patients with unilateral neglect. Eight right hemisphere stroke patients with neglect performed a target cancelation paradigm. Patients were instructed to cross all open-eyed pictures amidst closed eyed distractors. Target images were either in direct or averted gaze. Participants performed significantly better when observing targets with direct gaze supporting the hypothesis that this gaze direction captures attention. These findings further suggest that perception of direct gaze is able to diminish the visuospatial impairment seen in neglect patients.

Brief social attention bias modification for children with autism spectrum disorder

Reduced social attention is a hallmark feature in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), emerging as early as the first year of life. This difference represents a possible mechanism impacting upon the development of more complex social-communicative behaviors. The aim of this study was to develop and test the efficacy of a novel attention bias modification paradigm to alter social attention, specifically orienting to faces. Children with ASD (n = 66), aged between 5 and 12 years, were randomized to play either a social attention training or control game for 15 min. Children playing the training game were reinforced for attending to and engaging with social characters, whereas children in the control group were equally rewarded for attending to both social and non-social characters. Eye-tracking measures were obtained before and after gameplay. There was a significant increase in the percentage of first fixations to faces, relative to objects, after social attention training compared to a control group, associated with a medium effect size (partial η = 0.15). The degree of social attention change in the training group was inversely associated with restricted and repetitive behaviors and moderated by comorbid attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnoses, suggestive of differential training effects based on individual symptom profiles. By using the principles of attention bias modification, we demonstrated that social attention can be acutely modified in children with ASD, with an increased tendency to orient attention toward faces after brief social attention training. Modifying attentional biases may therefore represent a potential novel mechanism to alter the development of social communication trajectories. Autism Res 2019, 12: 527-535 © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Some children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) do not look at faces or eyes as much as their non-ASD peers do. Using a game where players have to pay attention to characters with faces to score points, we found that children playing the game began to look more at faces, even outside of the game. Looking at faces is an important prerequisite to many social interactions, telling us about others' emotions and states of attention-things that become harder to understand when they are not seen. If children with ASD could use games to help train looking at faces in real life, then they may be in a better position to understand and participate in social exchanges.

Autism Pathogenesis: The Superior Colliculus

After been exposed to the visual input, in the first year of life, the brain experiences subtle but massive changes apparently crucial for communicative/emotional and social human development. Its lack could be the explanation of the very high prevalence of autism in children with total congenital blindness. The present theory postulates that the superior colliculus is the key structure for such changes for several reasons: it dominates visual behavior during the first months of life; it is ready at birth for complex visual tasks; it has a significant influence on several hemispheric regions; it is the main brain hub that permanently integrates visual and non-visual, external and internal information (bottom-up and top-down respectively); and it owns the enigmatic ability to take non-conscious decisions about where to focus attention. It is also a sentinel that triggers the subcortical mechanisms which drive social motivation to follow faces from birth and to react automatically to emotional stimuli. Through indirect connections it also activates simultaneously several cortical structures necessary to develop social cognition and to accomplish the multiattentional task required for conscious social interaction in real life settings. Genetic or non-genetic prenatal or early postnatal factors could disrupt the SC functions resulting in autism. The timing of postnatal biological disruption matches the timing of clinical autism manifestations. Astonishing coincidences between etiologies, clinical manifestations, cognitive and pathogenic autism theories on one side and SC functions on the other are disclosed in this review. Although the visual system dependent of the SC is usually considered as accessory of the LGN canonical pathway, its imprinting gives the brain a qualitatively specific functions not supplied by any other brain structure.

What Makes Eye Contact Special? Neural Substrates of On-Line Mutual Eye-Gaze: A Hyperscanning fMRI Study

Automatic mimicry is a critical element of social interaction. A salient type of automatic mimicry is eye contact characterized by sharing of affective and mental states among individuals. We conducted a hyperscanning functional magnetic resonance imaging study involving on-line (LIVE) and delayed off-line (REPLAY) conditions to test our hypothesis that recurrent interaction through eye contact activates the limbic mirror system, including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and anterior insular cortex (AIC), both of which are critical for self-awareness. Sixteen pairs of human adults participated in the experiment. Given that an eye-blink represents an individual's attentional window toward the partner, we analyzed pairwise time-series data for eye-blinks. We used multivariate autoregression analysis to calculate the noise contribution ratio (NCR) as an index of how a participant's directional attention was influenced by that of their partner. NCR was greater in the LIVE than in the REPLAY condition, indicating mutual perceptual-motor interaction during real-time eye contact. Relative to the REPLAY condition, the LIVE condition was associated with greater activation in the left cerebellar hemisphere, vermis, and ACC, accompanied by enhanced functional connectivity between ACC and right AIC. Given the roles of the cerebellum in sensorimotor prediction and ACC in movement initiation, ACC-cerebellar activation may represent their involvement in modulating visual input related to the partner's movement, which may, in turn, involve the limbic mirror system. Our findings indicate that mutual interaction during eye contact is mediated by the cerebellum and limbic mirror system.

Individual differences, social attention, and the history of the social motivation hypotheses of autism

The stereotype of people with autism as unresponsive or uninterested in other people was prominent in the 1980s. However, this view of autism has steadily given way to recognition of important individual differences in the social-emotional development of affected people and a more precise understanding of the possible role social motivation has in their early development.

Early life predictors of callous-unemotional and psychopathic traits

Psychopathy is a disorder that occurs primarily in males. Offenders with psychopathic traits are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime in society, particularly violent crime. Early childhood is a time when individual differences in empathy and guilt-key indicators of the construct of psychopathy-are first evident. A growing number of longitudinal studies have begun to investigate how factors in infancy and early childhood predict psychopathic-like traits in later childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. These studies have suggested that parenting styles during infancy (parental sensitivity, maternal harsh intrusion, commenting on the emotional state of the child) as well as attachment styles are predictive of later psychopathic-like traits. In addition, child characteristics such as temperament and the functioning of biological systems such as the autonomic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis are predictive. Overall, studies have suggested that at least some of the origins of psychopathic traits are present in infancy and early childhood, which is consistent with the perspective of psychopathy as a neurodevelopmental disorder. A recent evolutionary-developmental model provides hypotheses regarding how psychopathy may develop and why it is more common in males than females. This model, and its implications for intervention, is discussed in the context of the longitudinal studies that have been conducted on psychopathy.

On the role of eye contact in gaze cueing

Most experimental protocols examining joint attention with the gaze cueing paradigm are "observational" and "offline", thereby not involving social interaction. We examined whether within a naturalistic online interaction, real-time eye contact influences the gaze cueing effect (GCE). We embedded gaze cueing in an interactive protocol with the iCub humanoid robot. This has the advantage of ecological validity combined with excellent experimental control. Critically, before averting the gaze, iCub either established eye contact or not, a manipulation enabled by an algorithm detecting position of the human eyes. For non-predictive gaze cueing procedure (Experiment 1), only the eye contact condition elicited GCE, while for counter-predictive procedure (Experiment 2), only the condition with no eye contact induced GCE. These results reveal an interactive effect of strategic (gaze validity) and social (eye contact) top-down components on the reflexive orienting of attention induced by gaze cues. More generally, we propose that naturalistic protocols with an embodied presence of an agent can cast a new light on mechanisms of social cognition.

Task Dependent Effects of Head Orientation on Perceived Gaze Direction

The perception of gaze direction involves the integration of a number of sensory cues exterior to the eye-region. The orientation of the head is one such cue, which has an overall repulsive effect on the perceived direction of gaze. However, in a recent experiment, we found the measured effect of head orientation on perceived gaze direction differed within subjects, depending on whether a single- or two-interval task design was employed. This suggests a potential difference in the way the orientation of the head is integrated into the perception of gaze direction across tasks. Four experiments were conducted to investigate this difference. The first two experiments showed that the difference was not the result of some interaction between stimuli in the two-interval task, but rather, a difference between the types of judgment being made across tasks, where observers were making a directional (left/right) judgment in the single-interval task, and a non-directional (direct/indirect gaze) judgment in the two-interval task. A third experiment showed that this difference does not arise from observers utilizing a non-directional cue to direct gaze (the circularity of the pupil/iris) in making their non-directional judgments. The fourth experiment showed no substantial differences in the duration of evidence accumulation and processing between judgments, suggesting that observers are not integrating different sensory information across tasks. Together these experiments show that the sensory information from head orientation is flexibly weighted in the perception of gaze direction, and that the purpose of the observer, in sampling gaze information, can influence the consequent perception of gaze direction.

Theta resting EEG in TPJ/pSTS is associated with individual differences in the feeling of being looked at

Direct eye gaze is a powerful stimulus in social interactions, yet people vary considerably in the range of gaze lines that they accept as being direct (cone of direct gaze, CoDG). Here, we searched for a possible neural trait marker of these individual differences. We measured the width of the CoDG in 137 healthy participants and related their individual CoDG to their neural baseline activation as measured with resting electroencephalogram. Using a source-localization technique, we found that resting theta current density in the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) and adjacent posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) was associated with the width of CoDG. Our findings suggest that the higher the baseline cortical activation in the left TPJ/pSTS, the wider the CoDG and thus the more liberal the individuals’ judgments were in deciding whether a looker stimulus was making eye contact or not. This is a first demonstration of the neural signatures underlying individual differences in the feeling of being looked at.

Adaptation to the Direction of Others' Gaze: A Review

The direction of another person’s gaze provides us with a strong cue to their intentions and future actions, and, correspondingly, the human visual system has evolved to extract information about others’ gaze from the sensory stream. The perception of gaze is a remarkably plastic process: adaptation to a particular direction of gaze over a matter of seconds or minutes can cause marked aftereffects in our sense of where other people are looking. In this review, we first discuss the measurement, specificity, and neural correlates of gaze aftereffects. We then examine how studies that have explored the perceptual and neural determinants of gaze aftereffects have provided key insights into the nature of how other people’s gaze direction is represented within the visual hierarchy. This includes the level of perceptual representation of gaze direction (e.g., relating to integrated vs. local facial features) and the interaction of this system with higher-level social-cognitive functions, such as theory of mind. Moreover, computational modeling of data from behavioral studies of gaze adaptation allows us to make inferences about the functional principles that govern the neural encoding of gaze direction. This in turn provides a foundation for testing computational theories of neuropsychiatric conditions in which gaze processing is compromised, such as autism.

Eye contact reduces lying

The perception of watching eyes has been found to reduce dishonest behavior. This effect, however, has only been shown in situations where it can be explained by increased adherence to rules and norms, and thus a watching-eyes effect on dishonesty per se has not been demonstrated. Moreover, the effect has been investigated only with images of watching eyes, not in an interactive situation with a live person, which may arguably have different effects on behavior. In the present study, the effect of watching eyes on dishonesty was investigated with an interactive computer game of lying. Participants played the game against a confederate, whom they believed to be another participant. On each trial, they were briefly presented with a view of the confederate, after which they chose whether to lie in the game. The confederate alternated between the use of direct and downward gaze. The results showed that another individual's direct gaze reduced lying in the game. The findings have implications for both everyday and professional situations, such as clinical conversations and police interrogations.

Visual preferences for direct-gaze faces in infant macaques (Macaca mulatta) with limited face exposure

From birth, human and nonhuman primates attend more to faces with direct gaze compared with averted gaze, and previous studies report that attention to the eyes is linked to the emergence of later social skills. Here, we explored whether early experiences influence attraction to eye contact in infant macaques by examining their attention to face pairs varying in their gaze direction across the first 13 weeks of life. Infants raised by human caretakers had limited conspecific interactions (nursery-reared; N = 16) and were compared to infants raised in rich social environments (mother-reared; N = 20). Both groups looked longer to faces and the eyes of direct compared to averted-gaze faces. Looking to all faces and eyes also increased with age. Nursery-reared infants did not display age-associated increases in attention to direct-gaze faces specifically, suggesting that, while there may be an initial preference for direct-gaze faces from birth, social experiences may support its early development.

Teachers' gaze over space and time in a real-world classroom

Reading students’ faces and their body language, checking their worksheets, and keeping eye contact is a key trait of teacher competence. The new technology of mobile eye-tracking provides researchers with possibilities to explore teaching from the viewpoint of teacher gaze, but also introduces many new method questions. This study had the primary aim to investigate teachers´ attention distribution over space: the number and durations of several types of their gazes, and how their gaze depends on the factors of students´ gender, achievement, and position in the classroom. Results show that teacher gaze was distributed unevenly across both space and time. Teachers looked at the most-watched students 3-8 times more often than at the least-watched ones. Students sitting in the first row and the middle section received significantly more gaze than those sitting outside this zone. All three teachers made more single gaze visits - looking at the students but making no eye contact - than mutual gazes or student material gazes. The three teachers’ gaze distribution also varied substantially from lesson to lesson. Our results are important for understanding teacher behavior in real classrooms, but also point to the relevance of appropriate method design in future classroom studies with eye-tracking.

Eye contact modulates facial mimicry in 4-month-old infants: An EMG and fNIRS study

Mimicry, the tendency to spontaneously and unconsciously copy others' behaviour, plays an important role in social interactions. It facilitates rapport between strangers, and is flexibly modulated by social signals, such as eye contact. However, little is known about the development of this phenomenon in infancy, and it is unknown whether mimicry is modulated by social signals from early in life. Here we addressed this question by presenting 4-month-old infants with videos of models performing facial actions (e.g., mouth opening, eyebrow raising) and hand actions (e.g., hand opening and closing, finger actions) accompanied by direct or averted gaze, while we measured their facial and hand muscle responses using electromyography to obtain an index of mimicry (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2 the infants observed the same stimuli while we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate the brain regions involved in modulating mimicry by eye contact. We found that 4-month-olds only showed evidence of mimicry when they observed facial actions accompanied by direct gaze. Experiment 2 suggests that this selective facial mimicry may have been associated with activation over posterior superior temporal sulcus. These findings provide the first demonstration of modulation of mimicry by social signals in young human infants, and suggest that mimicry plays an important role in social interactions from early in life.

Improving social gaze behavior in fragile X syndrome using a behavioral skills training approach: a proof of concept study

Background

Individuals diagnosed with fragile X syndrome (FXS), the most common known inherited form of intellectual disability, commonly exhibit significant impairments in social gaze behavior during interactions with others. Although this behavior can restrict social development and limit educational opportunities, behavioral interventions designed to improve social gaze behavior have not been developed for this population. In this proof of concept (PoC) study, we examined whether administering a behavioral skills training package—discrete trial instruction (DTI) plus relaxation training—could increase social gaze duration in males with FXS.

Methods

As part of a larger clinical trial, 20 boys with FXS, aged 8 to 18 years, were randomized to receive DTI plus relaxation training administered at one of two prescribed doses over a 2-day period at our research center. Potential improvements in social gaze behavior were evaluated by direct observations conducted across trials during the training, and generalization effects were examined by administering a social challenge before and after the treatment. During the social challenge, social gaze behavior was recorded using an eye tracker and physiological arousal levels were simultaneously recorded by monitoring the child’s heart rate.

Results

Levels of social gaze behavior increased significantly across blocks of training trials for six (60%) boys who received the high-dose behavioral treatment and for three (30%) boys who received the low-dose behavioral treatment. Boys who received the high-dose treatment also showed greater improvements in social gaze behavior during the social challenge compared to boys who received the low-dose treatment. There was no effect of the treatment on physiological arousal levels recorded on the heart rate monitor at either dose.

Conclusions

These results suggest that appropriate social gaze behavior can be successfully taught to boys with FXS using a standardized behavioral skills training approach. Future studies will need to evaluate whether younger children with FXS might benefit from this treatment, and/or whether more naturalistic forms of behavioral skills training might be beneficial, before social gaze avoidance becomes established in the child’s repertoire.

Trial registration

ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02616796. Registered 30 November 2015.

Affective Eye Contact: An Integrative Review

In recent years, many studies have shown that perceiving other individuals' direct gaze has robust effects on various attentional and cognitive processes. However, considerably less attention has been devoted to investigating the affective effects triggered by eye contact. This article reviews research concerning the effects of others' gaze direction on observers' affective responses. The review focuses on studies in which affective reactions have been investigated in well-controlled laboratory experiments, and in which contextual factors possibly influencing perceivers' affects have been controlled. Two important themes emerged from this review. First, explicit affective evaluations of seeing another's direct versus averted gaze have resulted in rather inconsistent findings; some studies report more positive subjective feelings to direct compared to averted gaze, whereas others report the opposite pattern. These contradictory findings may be related, for example, to differences between studies in terms of the capability of direct-gaze stimuli to elicit feelings of self-involvement. Second, studies relying on various implicit measures have reported more consistent results; they indicate that direct gaze increases affective arousal, and more importantly, that eye contact automatically evokes a positively valenced affective reaction. Based on the review, possible psychological mechanisms for the positive affective reactions elicited by eye contact are described.

Look at Me: Early Gaze Engagement Enhances Corticospinal Excitability During Action Observation

Direct gaze is a powerful social cue able to capture the onlooker’s attention. Beside gaze, head and limb movements as well can provide relevant sources of information for social interaction. This study investigated the joint role of direct gaze and hand gestures on onlookers corticospinal excitability (CE). In two experiments we manipulated the temporal and spatial aspects of observed gaze and hand behavior to assess their role in affecting motor preparation. To do this, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on the primary motor cortex (M1) coupled with electromyography (EMG) recording was used in two experiments. In the crucial manipulation, we showed to participants four video clips of an actor who initially displayed eye contact while starting a social request gesture, and then completed the action while directing his gaze toward a salient object for the interaction. This way, the observed gaze potentially expressed the intention to interact. Eye tracking data confirmed that gaze manipulation was effective in drawing observers’ attention to the actor’s hand gesture. In the attempt to reveal possible time-locked modulations, we tracked CE at the onset and offset of the request gesture. Neurophysiological results showed an early CE modulation when the actor was about to start the request gesture looking straight to the participants, compared to when his gaze was averted from the gesture. This effect was time-locked to the kinematics of the actor’s arm movement. Overall, data from the two experiments seem to indicate that the joint contribution of direct gaze and precocious kinematic information, gained while a request gesture is on the verge of beginning, increases the subjective experience of involvement and allows observers to prepare for an appropriate social interaction. On the contrary, the separation of gaze cues and body kinematics can have adverse effects on social motor preparation. CE is highly susceptible to biological cues, such as averted gaze, which is able to automatically capture and divert observer’s attention. This point to the existence of heuristics based on early action and gaze cues that would allow observers to interact appropriately.

How wide is the cone of direct gaze?

The cone of direct gaze refers to the range of gaze deviations an observer accepts as looking directly at them. Previous experiments have calculated the width of the cone of direct gaze using the gaze deviations actually presented to the observer, however, there is considerable evidence that observers actually perceive gaze to be systematically more deviated than actually presented. Here, we examine the width of the cone of direct gaze in units of perceived gaze deviation. In doing so, we are able to disambiguate differences in width both within and between observers that are due to differences in their perception of gaze and due to differences in what observers consider to be looking at them. We suggest that this line of inquiry can offer further insight into the perception of gaze direction, and how this perception may differ in clinical populations.

Personality Traits Do Not Predict How We Look at Faces

While personality has typically been considered to influence gaze behaviour, literature relating to the topic is mixed. Previously, we found no evidence of self-reported personality traits on preferred gaze duration between a participant and a person looking at them via a video. In this study, 77 of the original participants answered an in-depth follow-up survey containing a more comprehensive assessment of personality traits (Big Five Inventory) than was initially used, to check whether earlier findings were caused by the personality measure being too coarse. In addition to preferred mutual gaze duration, we also examined two other factors linked to personality traits: number of blinks and total fixation duration in the eye region of observed faces. No significant correlations were found between any of these measures and participant personality traits. We suggest that effects previously reported in the literature may stem from contextual differences or modulation of arousal.