TY - JOUR

T1 - Social modulation of on-screen looking behaviour

AU - Dosso, Jill A.

AU - Anderson, Nicola C.

AU - Wahn, Basil

AU - Choi, Gini S.J.

AU - Kingstone, Alan

N1 - Funding information: The authors thank Katherine Nga Tsit Chow, George Molina, and Levana Fernadi for assistance in data collection and coding. This work was supported by grants to AK from Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council ( NSERC ) ( RGPIN-2016-04319 ) and its Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) ( 435-2013-2200 ). The authors thank Katherine Nga Tsit Chow, George Molina, and Levana Fernadi for assistance in data collection and coding. This work was supported by grants to AK from Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) (RGPIN-2016-04319) and its Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) (435-2013-2200).

PY - 2021/5

Y1 - 2021/5

N2 - While passive social information (e.g. pictures of people) routinely draws one's eyes, our willingness to look at live others is more nuanced. People tend not to stare at strangers and will modify their gaze behaviour to avoid sending undesirable social signals; yet they often continue to monitor others covertly “out of the corner of their eyes.” What this means for looks that are being made near to live others is unknown. Will the eyes be drawn towards the other person, or pushed away? We evaluate changes in two elements of gaze control: image-independent principles guiding how people look (e.g. biases to make eye movements along the cardinal directions) and image-dependent principles guiding what people look at (e.g. a preference for meaningful content within a scene). Participants were asked to freely view semantically unstructured (fractals) and semantically structured (rotated landscape) images, half of which were located in the space near to a live other. We found that eye movements were horizontally displaced away from a visible other starting at 1032 ms after stimulus onset when fractals but not landscapes were viewed. We suggest that the avoidance of looking towards live others extends to the near space around them, at least in the absence of semantically meaningful gaze targets.

AB - While passive social information (e.g. pictures of people) routinely draws one's eyes, our willingness to look at live others is more nuanced. People tend not to stare at strangers and will modify their gaze behaviour to avoid sending undesirable social signals; yet they often continue to monitor others covertly “out of the corner of their eyes.” What this means for looks that are being made near to live others is unknown. Will the eyes be drawn towards the other person, or pushed away? We evaluate changes in two elements of gaze control: image-independent principles guiding how people look (e.g. biases to make eye movements along the cardinal directions) and image-dependent principles guiding what people look at (e.g. a preference for meaningful content within a scene). Participants were asked to freely view semantically unstructured (fractals) and semantically structured (rotated landscape) images, half of which were located in the space near to a live other. We found that eye movements were horizontally displaced away from a visible other starting at 1032 ms after stimulus onset when fractals but not landscapes were viewed. We suggest that the avoidance of looking towards live others extends to the near space around them, at least in the absence of semantically meaningful gaze targets.

KW - Fractal

KW - Gaze control

KW - Interpersonal

KW - Landscape

KW - Social attention

KW - Social presence

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85100426971&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.visres.2020.12.009

DO - 10.1016/j.visres.2020.12.009

M3 - Article

C2 - 33550023

AN - SCOPUS:85100426971

VL - 182

JO - Vision research

JF - Vision research

SN - 0042-6989

ER -