Do the eyes have it? Cues to the direction of social attention.

By Stephen R H Langton, R. Watt, Vicki Bruce. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2000

930 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The face communicates an impressive amount of visual information. We use it to identify its owner, how they are feeling and to help us understand what they are saying. Models of face processing have considered how we extract such meaning from the face but have ignored another important signal - eye gaze. In this article we begin by reviewing evidence from recent neurophysiological studies that suggests that the eyes constitute a special stimulus in at least two senses. First, the structure of the eyes is such that it provides us with a particularly powerful signal to the direction of another person's gaze, and second, we may have evolved neural mechanisms devoted to gaze processing. As a result, gaze direction is analysed rapidly and automatically, and is able to trigger reflexive shifts of an observer's visual attention. However, understanding where another individual is directing their attention involves more than simply analysing their gaze direction. We go on to describe research with adult participants, children and non-human primates that suggests that other cues such as head orientation and pointing gestures make significant contributions to the computation of another's direction of attention.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Sensory Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b6845e1df6ddc686d5c44109a3fed5ca6136ea74

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

In Sensory Systems

David J. Lewkowicz

Citations in the corpus

Collective behavior in road crossing pedestrians: the role of social information (2010, background): “They respond to signals, that is, behavior performed for the purpose of information transmission, for instance, vocalizations (Cherry 1978), and also inadvertent social cues, that is, behavior that is not necessarily performed for the purpose of information transmission such as gaze following and fa”
Speakers' eye gaze disambiguates referring expressions early during face-to-face conversation (2007, result): “The results of both experiments are consistent with the idea that eye gaze has an automatic, reflexive orienting effect on attention (e.g., Friesen & Kingstone, 1998; Friesen et al., 2004; Langton et al., 2000); matchers’ attention was immediately oriented to the spatial location in the directors’ l”
Understanding others' actions and goals by mirror and mentalizing systems: A meta-analysis (2009, neutral): “In support of this reasoning, it has been found that a gaze induces an automatic shift of the observer's attention in the seen gaze direction as revealed, for instance, by Posner's orienting task, in which the gaze is used as the central attention cue (Driver et al., 1999; Langton et al., 2000).”
Social norms and social influence (2015, background): “Like other primates, humans pay careful attention to others [6], and they imitate what they see [7].”
Gaze Cueing of Attention (2007, background): “The unique morphology of the human eye means that “useful information can be recovered from it with robust simple processing mechanisms” (Langton et al., 2000, p. 52).”
The eyes have it: the neuroethology, function and evolution of social gaze. (2000, neutral): “This proposition is discussed in greater detail in later sections and in a recent review by Langton and colleagues [90].”
Gaze Following in Newborns (2004, background): “The sensitivity to a conspecific’s eyes is highly adaptive (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Langton, Watt, & Bruce, 2000 ), and for this reason the special significance of gaze could have its roots very early in life.”
Get real! Resolving the debate about equivalent social stimuli (2009, background): “Although there are several cues to the direction of another person's attention (eg, gaze direction, head position, body position, pointing gestures), the above description suggests that gaze direction has a special status as an attentional cue (Emery, 2000 ; Langton, Watt, & Bruce, 2000 ).”
What speakers do and what addressees look at: visual attention to gestures in human interaction live and on video (2006, neutral): “…and to joint attention (Deák, Flom and Pick 2000; Doherty and Anders 1999; Driver, Davis, Ricciardelli, Kidd, Maxwell and Baron-Cohen 1999; Gibson and Pick 1963; Langton 2000; Langton and Bruce 1999; Langton, O'Malley and Bruce 1996; Langton, Watt and Bruce 2000; Moore and Dunham 1995).”
Neural bases of eye and gaze processing: the core of social cognition. (2009, neutral): “Head orientation, body position and pointing behavior are other important directional cues that are widely used to identify the source of interest of a peer when the eyes are not visible (Emery, 2000; Langton et al., 2000).”
Distinct representations for facial identity and changeable aspects of faces in the human temporal lobe (2004, background): “…forming a perceptual representation of the face that could be used for recognition of identity, whereas the superior temporal regions are concerned with changeable aspects of face perception that are important in social communication (Allison et al., 2000; Haxby et al., 2000; Langton et al., 2000).”
Human neural systems for face recognition and social communication. (2002, background): “These brain regions become part of the face perception system when they act in concert with the extrastriate face-responsive regions to extract meaning from faces and, thereby, facilitate recognition of different facial attributes.”