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I See What You See: Eye Movements in Real-World Scenes Are Affected by Perceived Direction of Gaze

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Attention in Cognitive Systems. Theories and Systems from an Interdisciplinary Viewpoint (WAPCV 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4840))

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Abstract

In this chapter, we report an investigation the influence of the saliency of another person’s direction of gaze on an observer’s eye movements through real-world scenes. Participants’ eye movements were recorded while they viewed a sequence of scene photographs that told a story. A subset of the scenes contained an actor. The actor’s face was highly likely to be fixated, and when it was, the observer’s next saccade was more likely to be toward the object that was the focus of the actor’s gaze than in any other direction. Furthermore, when eye movement patterns did not show an immediate saccade to the focused object, observers were nonetheless more likely to fixate the focused object than a control object within close temporal proximity of fixation on the face. We conclude that during real-world scene perception, observers are sensitive to another’s direction of gaze and use it to help guide their own eye movements.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Queen’s University, Kingston ON K7L 3N6, Canada

    Monica S. Castelhano

  2. Albion College, Albion MI 49224, USA

    Mareike Wieth

  3. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, UK

    John M. Henderson

Authors
  1. Monica S. Castelhano
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  2. Mareike Wieth
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  3. John M. Henderson
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Joanneum Research, Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, Computational Perception Group,, Institute of Digital Image Processing, Wastiangasse 6, 8010, Graz, Austria

    Lucas Paletta

  2. Autonomous Intelligent Systems (AIS), Autonomous Robots Department, Fraunhofer Institute, Schloss Birlinghoven, 53754, Sankt Augustin, Germany

    Erich Rome

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© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Castelhano, M.S., Wieth, M., Henderson, J.M. (2007). I See What You See: Eye Movements in Real-World Scenes Are Affected by Perceived Direction of Gaze. In: Paletta, L., Rome, E. (eds) Attention in Cognitive Systems. Theories and Systems from an Interdisciplinary Viewpoint. WAPCV 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4840. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77343-6_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77343-6_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-77342-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-77343-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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