Perceiving crowd attention: Gaze following in human crowds with conflicting cues

Adopting the visual perspective of a group member is influenced by implicit group averaging

As social entities, individuals' perception and behaviors are susceptible to the influence of their social groups. Previous research has consistently shown that the group context in which individuals are situated significantly influences their perceptual processing. We aim to investigate whether the group context in which another individual is situated alters our understanding of their visual perception, which holds profound implications for interpersonal interactions. To address this inquiry, we conducted three experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a visual scene depicting multiple avatars seated around a table, all facing an arrow positioned at the center of the table. They were instructed to adopt the visual perspective of a specific avatar within the group to perceive the arrow's orientation, and then reproduce its orientation from their own perspectives. We found that participants exhibited a bias towards the group's average perspective when reproducing the arrow's orientation. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that reinforced group processing could elicit an earlier appearance of this bias. In Experiment 3, we investigated an alternative explanation positing that the aforementioned bias originated from visual ensemble perception rather than group influence by instructing participants to reproduce the target avatar's position relative to the arrow's orientation. If the bias indeed originated from ensemble perception, it should also manifest in this task. However, the absence of any reproduction bias refuted this possibility. Through these experiments, we demonstrate that our understanding of an individual's perceptual experiences is influenced by the social context in which they are situated, which manifests as a convergence phenomenon.

The who and the where: Attention to identities and locations in groups

While it is widely accepted that the single gaze of another person elicits shifts of attention, there is limited work on the effects of multiple gazes on attention, despite real-world social cues often occurring in groups. Further, less is known regarding the role of unequal reliability of varying social and nonsocial information on attention. We addressed these gaps by employing a variant of the gaze cueing paradigm, simultaneously presenting participants with three faces. Block-wise, we manipulated whether one face (Identity condition) or one location (Location condition) contained a gaze cue entirely predictive of target location; all other cues were uninformative. Across trials, we manipulated the number of valid cues (number of faces gazing at target). We examined whether these two types of information (Identity vs. Location) were learned at a similar rate by statistically modelling cueing effects by trial count. Preregistered analyses returned no evidence for an interaction between condition, number of valid faces, and presence of the predictive element, indicating type of information did not affect participants' ability to employ the predictive element to alter behaviour. Exploratory analyses demonstrated (i) response times (RT) decreased faster across trials for the Identity compared with Location condition, with greater decreases when the predictive element was present versus absent, (ii) RTs decreased across trials for the Location condition only when it was completed first, and (iii) social competence altered RTs across conditions and trial number. Our work demonstrates a nuanced relationship between cue utility, condition type, and social competence on group cueing.

No effect of autistic traits on social attention: evidence based on single-cue and conflicting-cues scenarios

Individuals often use others' gaze and head directions to direct their attention. To investigate the influence of autistic traits on social attention, we conducted two experiments comparing groups with high and low autistic traits in single-cue (Experiment 1) and conflicting-cue (Experiment 2) scenarios. Our findings indicate that individuals responded more rapidly to the direction of a single social cue or the consensus of multiple cues. However, we did not observe significant differences in social attention between individuals with high and low autistic traits. Notably, as the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) increased, individuals with low autistic traits exhibited greater improvements in reaction speed compared to those with high autistic traits. This suggests that individuals with low autistic traits excel at leveraging temporal information to optimize their behavioral readiness over time, hinting at potential variations in cognitive flexibility related to autistic traits.

Inferential eye movement control while following dynamic gaze

Attending to other people's gaze is evolutionary important to make inferences about intentions and actions. Gaze influences covert attention and triggers eye movements. However, we know little about how the brain controls the fine-grain dynamics of eye movements during gaze following. Observers followed people's gaze shifts in videos during search and we related the observer eye movement dynamics to the time course of gazer head movements extracted by a deep neural network. We show that the observers' brains use information in the visual periphery to execute predictive saccades that anticipate the information in the gazer's head direction by 190-350ms. The brain simultaneously monitors moment-to-moment changes in the gazer's head velocity to dynamically alter eye movements and re-fixate the gazer (reverse saccades) when the head accelerates before the initiation of the first forward gaze-following saccade. Using saccade-contingent manipulations of the videos, we experimentally show that the reverse saccades are planned concurrently with the first forward gaze-following saccade and have a functional role in reducing subsequent errors fixating on the gaze goal. Together, our findings characterize the inferential and functional nature of social attention's fine-grain eye movement dynamics.

Influences of eye gaze cues on memory and its mechanisms: The function and evolution of social attention

During evolution, humans have formed a priority perceptual preference for others’ gazes. The gaze direction of others is called the gaze cue, conveying environmental information, a critical non-verbal communication in early humans. Recently, empirical evidence has indicated that gaze cues can affect high-level cognitive processes, such as memory. Unlike non-social cues (e.g., arrows), gaze cues elicit special social attention. Research determining the underlying mechanisms suggests that social intention influences observers’ visual attention and influences their memory. This article provides a brief review of the current state of research on the relationship between gaze cues and memory. Future studies should focus on multiple gaze cues, the social nature of gaze cues, and clinical research.

Evidence for a two-step model of social group influence

Social group influence plays an important role in societally relevant phenomena such as rioting and mass panic. One way through which groups influence individuals is by directing their gaze. Evidence that gaze following increases with group size has typically been explained in terms of strategic processes. Here, we tested the role of reflexive processes. In an ecologically valid virtual reality task, we found that participants were more likely to follow the group’s gaze when more people looked, even though they knew the group provided no relevant information. Interestingly, participants also sometimes changed their mind after starting to follow the gaze of the group, indicating that automatic imitation can be overruled by strategic processes. This suggests that social group influence is best explained by a two-step model in which bottom-up imitative processes first elicit a reflexive tendency to imitate, before top-down strategic processes determine whether to execute or inhibit this reflex.

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Groups influence human behavior in two stages

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First, groups elicit a reflexive tendency to imitate

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Second, strategic processes decide to execute or inhibit this reflex

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Social group conformity may be more automatic than previously thought

Great Minds Think Alike? Spatial Search Processes Can Be More Idiosyncratic When Guided by More Accurate Information

Existing research demonstrates that pre‐decisional information sampling strategies are often stable within a given person while varying greatly across people. However, it remains largely unknown what drives these individual differences, that is, why in some circumstances we collect information more idiosyncratically. In this brief report, we present a pre‐registered online study of spatial search. Using a novel technique that combines machine‐learning dimension reduction and sequence alignment algorithms, we quantify the extent to which the shape and temporal properties of a search trajectory are idiosyncratic. We show that this metric increases (trajectories become more idiosyncratic) when a person is better informed about the likely location of the search target, while poorly informed individuals seem more likely to resort to default search routines determined bottom‐up by the properties of the search field. This shows that when many people independently attempt to solve a task in a similar way, they are not necessarily “onto something.”

The spatial distance compression effect is due to social interaction and not mere configuration

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in perception, evaluation, and memory for social interactions from a third-person perspective. One intriguing finding is a spatial distance compression effect when target dyads are facing each other. Specifically, face-to-face dyads are remembered as being spatially closer than back-to-back dyads. There is a vibrant debate about the mechanism behind this effect, and two hypotheses have been proposed. According to the social interaction hypothesis, face-to-face dyads engage a binding process that represents them as a social unit, which compresses the perceived distance between them. In contrast, the configuration hypothesis holds that the effect is produced by the front-to-front configuration of the two visual targets. In the present research we sought to test these accounts. In Experiment 1 we successfully replicated the distance compression effect with two upright faces that were facing each other, but not with inverted faces. In contrast, we found no distance compression effect with three types of nonsocial stimuli: arrows (Experiment 2a), fans (Experiment 2b), and cars (Experiment 3). In Experiment 4, we replicated this effect with another social stimuli: upright bodies. Taken together, these results provide strong support for the social interaction hypothesis.

Standing out from the crowd: Both cue numerosity and social information affect attention in multi-agent contexts

Groups of people offer abundant opportunities for social interactions. We used a two-phase task to investigate how social cue numerosity and social information about an individual affected attentional allocation in such multi-agent settings. The learning phase was a standard gaze-cuing procedure in which a stimulus face could be either uninformative or informative about the upcoming target. The test phase was a group-cuing procedure in which the stimulus faces from the learning phase were presented in groups of three. The target could either be cued by the group minority (i.e., one face) or majority (i.e., two faces) or by uninformative or informative stimulus faces. Results showed an effect of cue numerosity, whereby responses were faster to targets cued by the group majority than the group minority. However, responses to targets cued by informative identities included in the group minority were as fast as responses to targets cued by the group majority. Thus, previously learned social information about an individual was able to offset the general enhancement of cue numerosity, revealing a complex interplay between cue numerosity and social information in guiding attention in multi-agent settings.

Collective rule-breaking

Rules form an important part of our everyday lives. Here we explore the role of social influence in rule-breaking. In particular, we identify some of the cognitive mechanisms underlying rule-breaking and propose approaches for how they can be scaled up to the level of groups or crowds to better understand the emergence of collective rule-breaking. Social contagion plays an important role in such processes and different dynamics such as linear or rapid nonlinear spreading can have important consequences for interventions in rule-breaking. A closer integration of cognitive psychology, microsociology and mathematical modelling will be key to a deeper understanding of collective rule-breaking to turn this field of research into a predictive science.

Tracking multiple perspectives: Spontaneous computation of what individuals in high entitative groups see

Perspective-taking ability is crucial for supporting social interactions. It has been widely suggested that the calculation of an individual's perspective is spontaneous. Nevertheless, people typically engage with more than one individual, and computing what individuals in a crowd see is important. The current study explored whether people spontaneously compute the perspectives of individuals displayed in a crowd. The classic visual perspective-taking task was adopted, but the picture of the room was presented with four human avatars facing two walls. The results showed that if the crowd of individuals was treated as a high entitative group, when none of the perspectives of the individuals contained the same number of discs as that from the perspective of the participant, the judgment of the participant's perspective was slower than when a proportion of the perspectives of the individuals displayed in the crowd were consistent with the participant's perspective, even if the perspectives of the multiple individuals in a crowd were not explicitly noticed. This altercentric intrusion effect was not present when the crowd had low entitativity. These findings were replicated by using different methods to operationalize group entitativity. Hence, this study demonstrates that spontaneously tracking the perspectives of individuals displayed in a crowd has a boundary condition and that people can spontaneously compute what individuals in high entitative groups see.

Prior attentional bias is modulated by social gaze

Focusing attention is a key cognitive skill, but how the gaze of others affects engaged attention remains relatively unknown. We investigated if participants' attentional bias toward a location is modulated by the number of people gazing toward or away from it. We presented participants with a nonpredictive directional cue that biased attention towards a specific location. Then, any number of four stimulus faces turned their gaze toward or away from the attended location. When all the faces looked at the attended location participants increased their commitment to it, and response time to targets at that location were speeded. When most or all of the faces looked away from the attended location, attention was withdrawn, and response times were slowed. This study reveals that the gaze of others can penetrate one's ability to focus attention, which in turn can be both beneficial and costly to one's responses to events in the environment.

Gaze deflection reveals how gaze cueing is tuned to extract the mind behind the eyes

Suppose you are surreptitiously looking at someone, and then when they catch you staring at them, you immediately turn away. This is a social phenomenon that almost everyone experiences occasionally. In such experiences-which we will call gaze deflection-the "deflected" gaze is not directed at anything in particular but simply away from the other person. As such, this is a rare instance where we may turn to look in a direction without intending to look there specifically. Here we show that gaze cues are markedly less effective at orienting an observer's attention when they are seen as deflected in this way-even controlling for low-level visual properties. We conclude that gaze cueing is a sophisticated mental phenomenon: It is not merely driven by perceived eye or head motions but is rather well tuned to extract the "mind" behind the eyes.

Synchronization of complex human networks

The synchronization of human networks is essential for our civilization and understanding its dynamics is important to many aspects of our lives. Human ensembles were investigated, but in noisy environments and with limited control over the network parameters which govern the network dynamics. Specifically, research has focused predominantly on all-to-all coupling, whereas current social networks and human interactions are often based on complex coupling configurations. Here, we study the synchronization between violin players in complex networks with full and accurate control over the network connectivity, coupling strength, and delay. We show that the players can tune their playing period and delete connections by ignoring frustrating signals, to find a stable solution. These additional degrees of freedom enable new strategies and yield better solutions than are possible within current models such as the Kuramoto model. Our results may influence numerous fields, including traffic management, epidemic control, and stock market dynamics.

Incidental learning of group trust: Predictive gaze cue matters

Human gaze is a subtle cue to deliver information and helps impression formation in social interactions. People automatically follow the gaze direction of others and shift their attention accordingly, as well as determine the trustworthiness of others based on the predictable validity of their gaze behavior, yet it remains unclear how this works at the collective level. Therefore, the current study is the first to explore the incidental learning of trust from a group’s gaze behavior. To simulate different patterns of perceiving collective information in real life, two ways of presenting group member gazes were used in the object categorization task, the simultaneous way in Experiment 1 and the sequential way in Experiment 3, and a sampling strategy was ruled out in Experiment 2. Converging findings in experiments demonstrated a typical gaze-cueing effect, and more importantly, the Predictive-valid group obtained more trust compared to the Predictive-invalid group. To enrich and expand the applicability of the incidental trust learning effect from gazes, the current study provides supportive evidence at the collective level, confirming that humans have an efficient capability to process gaze information of groups.

ERP evidence on how gaze convergence affects social attention

How people process gaze cues from multiple others is an important topic but rarely studied. Our study investigated this question using an adapted gaze cueing paradigm to examine the cueing effect of multiple gazes and its neural correlates. We manipulated gaze directions from two human avatars to be either convergent, created by the two avatars simultaneously averting their gazes to the same direction, or non-convergent, when only one of the two avatars shifted its gaze. Our results showed faster reaction times and larger target-congruency effects following convergent gazes shared by the avatars, compared with the non-convergent gaze condition. These findings complement previous research to demonstrate that observing shared gazes from as few as two persons is sufficient to enhance gaze cueing. Additionally, ERP analyses revealed that (1) convergent gazes evoked both left and right hemisphere N170, while non-convergent gazes evoked N170 mainly in the hemisphere contralateral to the cueing face; (2) effects of target congruency on target-locked N1 and P3 were modulated by gaze convergence. These findings shed light on temporal features of the processing of multi-gaze cues.

Inferring User Intent using Bayesian Theory of Mind in Shared Avatar-Agent Virtual Environments

We present a real-time algorithm to infer the intention of a user's avatar in a virtual environment shared with multiple human-like agents. Our algorithm applies the Bayesian Theory of Mind approach to make inferences about the avatar's hidden intentions based on the observed proxemics and gaze-based cues. Our approach accounts for the potential irrationality in human behavior, as well as the dynamic nature of an individual's intentions. The inferred intent is used to guide the response of the virtual agent and generate locomotion and gaze-based behaviors. Our overall approach allows the user to actively interact with tens of virtual agents from a first-person perspective in an immersive setting. We systematically evaluate our inference algorithm in controlled multi-agent simulation environments and highlight its ability to reliably and efficiently infer the hidden intent of a user's avatar even under noisy conditions. We quantitatively demonstrate the performance benefits of our approach in terms of reducing false inferences, as compared to a prior method. The results of our user evaluation show that 68.18% of participants reported feeling more comfortable in sharing the virtual environment with agents simulated with our algorithm as compared to a prior inference method, likely as a direct result of significantly fewer false inferences and more plausible responses from the virtual agents.

How attention gates social interactions

Social interactions are at the core of social life. However, humans selectively choose their exchange partners and do not engage in all available opportunities for social encounters. In this review, we argue that attentional systems play an important role in guiding the selection of social interactions. Supported by both classic and emerging literature, we identify and characterize the three core processes-perception, interpretation, and evaluation-that interact with attentional systems to modulate selective responses to social environments. Perceptual processes facilitate attentional prioritization of social cues. Interpretative processes link attention with understanding of cues' social meanings and agents' mental states. Evaluative processes determine the perceived value of the source of social information. The interplay between attention and these three routes of processing places attention in a powerful role to manage the selection of the vast amount of social information that individuals encounter on a daily basis and, in turn, gate the selection of social interactions.