What about gaze as a communicative signal? In contrast to other primates, humans have evolved a large white sclera and marked eyebrows, making the eye region highly conspicuous and ideally suited for gaze following, and it has been argued that this is an evolutionary byproduct of the cooperative nature of humans. Not only can humans follow gaze, but they can also use gaze to actively direct eac...

We evaluated effects of gaze directional and other non-verbal visual cues on multiparty mediated communication. Groups of three participants (two actors, one subject) solved language puzzles in three audiovisual communication conditions. Each condition presented a different selection of images of the actors to subjects: (1) frontal motion video with 14% gaze; (2) motion video with head orientat...

We investigated the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) during high-acceleration, yaw-axis, head rotations in 12 normals and 15 patients with vestibular loss [7 unilateral vestibular deficient (UVD) and 8 bilateral vestibular deficient (BVD)]. We analyzed gaze stabilization within a 200-ms window after head rotation began, using phase planes, which allowed simultaneous analysis of gaze velocity and g...

Rapid coordinated eye-head movements, called saccadic gaze shifts, displace the line of sight from one location to another. A critical structure in the gaze control circuitry is the superior colliculus (SC) of the midbrain, which drives gaze saccades by relaying cortical commands to brainstem eye and head motor circuits. We proposed that the SC lies within a gaze feedback loop and generates an ...

The gaze of a fearful face silently signals a potential threat's location, while the happy-gaze communicates the location of impending reward. Imitating such gaze-shifts is an automatic form of social interaction that promotes survival of individual and group. Evidence from gaze-cueing studies suggests that covert allocation of attention to another individual's gaze-direction is facilitated whe...

Abstract Autism is characterized by atypical use of social communicative cues, such as another person’s gaze or point. Despite these real-world difficulties, experimental manipulations often reveal minimal group differences. One factor that may contribute to this failure to find differences is the use of oversimplified and decontextualized social stimuli to examine these behaviors (e.g., a solo...

The effects of another person's gaze on physiological arousal were investigated by measuring skin conductance responses (SCR). Twelve able children with autism and 12 control children were shown face stimuli with straight gaze (eye contact) or averted gaze on a computer monitor. In children with autism, the responses to straight gaze were stronger than responses to averted gaze, whereas there w...

The present study investigated whether another individual's gaze direction influences an observer's affective responses. In Experiment 1, subjective self-ratings and an affective priming paradigm were employed to examine how participants explicitly and implicitly, respectively, evaluated the affective valence of direct gaze, averted gaze, and closed eyes. The explicit self-ratings showed that p...

The present research explored when observing gaze shifts of another person, involving both the observer and a specific object, enhances desirability of the gazed-at object. Specifically, we offer an initial attempt to test the idea that a three-step sequence consisting of direct gaze at the observer, followed by object-directed gaze and then by direct gaze at the observer, cues the desirability...