Sarah McCrackin

Postdoc
McGill Univ
Email author

It’s all in the eyes: Gaze cues facilitate eye-movements based on directional and mentalistic information

Sarah McCrackin, Nada Khalil, Jelena Ristic

For more research from the Laboratory for Attention and Social Cognition, please feel free to visit: https://www.mcgill.ca/asc/

For questions related to this project, please email: sarah.mccrackin@mail.mcgill.ca

About me:

I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory for Attention and Social Cognition at McGill University. I study how we use the information from the eye-gaze of others to relate to them on an emotional level. This includes how we use gaze cues to infer the emotional states of others, to empathize with them, and to discriminate their facial expressions and direction of attention. I use electroencephalography to explore the neural underpinnings of cognition and behaviour when examining these questions, and I hope to expand on this in the future in the A&SC lab.

It’s all in the eyes: Gaze cues facilitate eye-movements based on directional and mentalistic information

Sarah McCrackin, Nada Khalil, Jelena Ristic
Abstract

We spontaneously look where others are looking. This gaze following facilitates social interactions, but it is unclear what drives it. Some have theorized that gaze following is driven by the directionality of the agent’s eye-gaze, a spontaneous adoption of their visual perspective, or both. Here, we used a novel task to dissociate the contributions of these two variables. Participants viewed an image of a human avatar at fixation and were instructed to quickly and accurately fixate a peripheral target (number 8) that was presented with a distractor at an opposing location. The avatar gazed towards the target or towards the distractor equally often. Critically, on half of the trials the avatar would perceive the target from their visual perspective, while on the other half of trials, the avatar would not. Webcam eye-tracking monitored how quickly and accurately participants fixated the target on each trial. Responses to the targets were faster and first fixations were more accurate when the avatar’s gaze direction and visual perspective signaled the same response (i.e. all congruent or all incongruent). Importantly, reliable performance detriments were observed when the avatar’s gaze direction and visual perspective signaled conflicting responses. These results suggest that eye-gaze is both a directional cue and a spontaneous perspective taking cue.