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

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.