To facilitate social interactions, humans need to process the responses that other people make to their actions, including eye movements that could establish joint attention. Here, we investigated the neurophysiological correlates of the processing of observed gaze responses following the participants’ own eye movement. These observed gaze responses could either establish, or fail to establish, joint attention. We implemented a gaze leading paradigm in which participants made a saccade from an on-screen face to an object, followed by the on-screen face either making a congruent or incongruent gaze shift. An N170 event-related potential was elicited by the peripherally located gaze shift stimulus. Critically, the N170 was greater for joint attention than non-joint gaze both when task-irrelevant (Experiment 1) and task-relevant (Experiment 2). These data suggest for the first time that the neurocognitive system responsible for structural encoding of face stimuli is affected by the establishment of participant-initiated joint attention.

中文翻译：

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N170事件相关电位在注视引导中区分了一致注视和不一致注视响应。

为了促进社交互动，人类需要处理其他人对其行为的反应，包括可以引起共同注意的眼球运动。在这里，我们调查了参与者自身眼睛运动后观察到的凝视反应的处理过程的神经生理相关性。这些观察到的凝视反应可能建立或未能建立共同的注意力。我们实施了凝视主导范式，其中参与者从屏幕上的面孔到对象进行扫视，然后屏幕上的面孔做出一致或不一致的凝视转移。N170事件相关电位是由周围位置的凝视转移刺激引起的。至关重要的是，与任务无关（实验1）和任务相关（实验2）时，N170对联合注意力的关注要大于非联合注视。