ABSTRACT

Humans as social beings rely on information provided by conspecifics. One important signal in social communication is eye gaze. The current study (n = 93) sought to replicate and extend previous findings of attentional guidance by eye gaze in complex everyday scenes. In line with previous studies, longer, more and earlier fixations for objects cued by gaze compared to objects that were not cued were observed in free viewing conditions. To investigate how robust this prioritization is against top-down modulation, half of the participants received a memory task that required scanning the whole scene instead of exclusively focusing on cued objects. Interestingly, similar gaze cueing effects occurred in this group. Moreover, the human beings depicted in the scene received a large amount of attention, especially during early phases of visual attention, even though they were irrelevant to the current task. These results indicate that the mere presence of other human beings, as well as their gaze orientation, have a strong impact on attentional exploration. Data and analysis scripts are available at https://osf.io/jk9s4.

摘要

作为社会的人类依赖于特定物种提供的信息。社交注视中的一个重要信号是视线。目前的研究（ñ = 93）试图在复杂的日常场景中通过视线来复制和扩展注意力指导的先前发现。与以前的研究一致，在自由观看条件下，观察到的凝视提示对象比未提示的对象更长，更早。为了研究此优先级对抗自上而下调制的鲁棒性，一半的参与者收到了一项记忆任务，该任务需要扫描整个场景，而不是专门关注提示的对象。有趣的是，该组中发生了类似的凝视提示效果。此外，尽管与当前任务无关，但场景中描绘的人类受到了大量关注，尤其是在视觉关注的早期阶段。这些结果表明，其他人的存在，以及他们的凝视方向，对注意力探索有很大的影响。数据和分析脚本可从https://osf.io/jk9s4获得。