People show a robust tendency to gaze at other human beings when viewing images or videos, but were also found to relatively avoid gaze at others in several real‐world situations. This discrepancy, along with theoretical considerations, spawned doubts about the appropriateness of classical laboratory‐based experimental paradigms in social attention research. Several researchers instead suggested the use of immersive virtual scenarios in eliciting and measuring naturalistic attentional patterns, but the field, struggling with methodological challenges, still needs to establish the advantages of this approach. Here, we show using eye‐tracking in a complex social scenario displayed in virtual reality that participants show enhanced attention towards the face of an avatar at near distance and demonstrate an increased reactivity towards her social gaze as compared to participants who viewed the same scene on a computer monitor. The present study suggests that reactive virtual agents observed in immersive virtual reality can elicit natural modes of information processing and can help to conduct ecologically more valid experiments while maintaining high experimental control.

中文翻译：

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与传统的实验室环境相比，虚拟现实中对社​​交注视的反应性更强

人们在观看图像或视频时表现出强烈的凝视他人的趋势，但在某些现实情况下，人们也相对避免凝视他人。这种差异，再加上理论上的考虑，引发了人们对社会关注研究中基于实验室的经典实验范式的适当性的怀疑。相反，一些研究人员建议使用沉浸式虚拟场景来引发和测量自然主义的注意力模式，但是，在方法论难题方面苦苦挣扎的领域仍然需要确立这种方法的优势。这里，我们展示了在虚拟现实中显示的复杂社交场景中使用眼动追踪的情况，与在计算机上查看相同场景的参与者相比，参与者对近距离的化身脸部表现出更高的关注度，并表现出对社交凝视的反应性增强监视器。本研究表明，在沉浸式虚拟现实中观察到的反应性虚拟主体可以激发信息处理的自然模式，并有助于进行更有效的生态实验，同时保持较高的实验控制力。