We investigated the metrics and kinematics of human eye-head gaze shifts using the anti-gaze shift task. Surprisingly, no systematic difference was found between peak gaze velocities of large pro- and anti-gaze shifts. In a follow-up experiment that equated perceived stimulus luminance across multiple eccentricities, pro-gaze shifts were consistently faster than anti-gaze shifts. In both experi...

Very young infants are sensitive to and follow other people’s gaze. By 18 months children, like chimpanzees, apparently represent the spatial relationship between viewer and object viewed: they can follow eye-direction alone, and react appropriately if the other’s gaze is blocked by occluding barriers. This paper assesses when children represent this relationship as psychological in nature. Stu...

In human-computer interaction, gaze orientation is an important and promising source of information to demonstrate the attention and focus of users. Gaze detection can also be an extremely useful metric for analysing human mood and affect. Furthermore, gaze can be used as an input method for human-computer interaction. However, currently real-time and accurate gaze estimation is still an open p...

A prominent hypothesis in motor control is that endpoint errors are minimized because motor commands are updated in real time via internal feedback loops. We investigated in monkey whether orienting saccadic gaze shifts made in the dark with coordinated eye-head movements are controlled by feedback. We recorded from superior colliculus fixation neurons (SCFNs) that fired tonically during fixati...

Eye contact is a crucial social cue constituting a frequent preliminary to interaction. Thus, the perception of others' gaze may be associated with specific processes beginning with asymmetries in the detection of direct versus averted gaze. We tested this hypothesis in two behavioural experiments using realistic eye stimuli in a visual search task. We manipulated the head orientation (frontal ...

In order to evaluate the following potential mechanisms underlying atypical gaze following in autism, impaired reflexive gaze following, difficulty integrating gaze and affect, or reduced understanding of the referential significance of gaze, we administered three paradigms to young children with autism (N = 21) and chronological (N = 21) and nonverbal mental age (N = 21) matched controls. Chil...

When the head is unrestrained, rapid displacements of the visual axis-gaze shifts (eye-re-space)-are made by coordinated movements of the eyes (eye-re-head) and head (head-re-space). To address the problem of the neural control of gaze shifts, we studied and contrasted the discharges of omnipause neurons (OPNs) during a variety of combined eye-head gaze shifts and head-fixed eye saccades execut...

Omnidirectional pause neurons (OPNs) pause for the duration of a saccade in all directions because they are part of the neural mechanism that controls saccade duration. In the natural situation, however, large saccades are accompanied by head movements to produce rapid gaze shifts. To determine whether OPNs are part of the mechanism that controls the whole gaze shift rather than the eye saccade...

The effects of correct and transformed visual feedback on rhythmic unimanual visuo-motor tracking were examined, focusing on tracking performance (accuracy and stability) and visual search behavior. Twelve participants (reduced to 9 in the analyses) manually tracked an oscillating visual target signal in phase (by moving the hand in the same direction as the target signal) and in antiphase (by ...