Psychology Department, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2012 Oct;38(5):1132-43. doi: 10.1037/a0027075. Epub 2012 Jun 11.
People tend to look at other people's eyes, but whether this bias is automatic or volitional is unclear. To discriminate between these two possibilities, we used a "don't look" (DL) paradigm. Participants looked at a series of upright or inverted faces, and were asked either to freely view the faces or to avoid looking at the eyes, or as a control, the mouth. As previously demonstrated, participants showed a bias to attend to both eyes and mouths during free viewing. In the DL condition, participants told to avoid the eyes of upright faces were unable to fully suppress the tendency to fixate on the faces' eyes, whereas participants told to avoid the mouth of upright faces successfully eliminated their bias to overtly attend to that feature. When faces were inverted, participants were equally able to suppress looks to the eyes and mouth. Together, these results suggest that the tendency to look at the eyes reflects orienting that is both volitional and automatic, and that the engagement of holistic or configural face processing mechanisms during upright face viewing has an influence in guiding gaze automatically to the eyes.
人们往往会注视他人的眼睛，但这种偏向是自动的还是自主的尚不清楚。为了区分这两种可能性，我们使用了“不看”（DL）范式。参与者观看一系列直立或倒置的面孔，并被要求自由地观看面孔或避免看眼睛，或者作为对照，看嘴。如前所述，参与者在自由观看时表现出偏向于关注眼睛和嘴巴。在 DL 条件下，被要求避免看直立面孔眼睛的参与者无法完全抑制注视面孔眼睛的倾向，而被要求避免看直立面孔嘴巴的参与者则成功地消除了他们对该特征进行明显关注的偏向。当面孔倒置时，参与者同样能够抑制对眼睛和嘴巴的注视。总之，这些结果表明，注视眼睛的倾向反映了既自主又自动的定向，并且在观看直立面孔时整体或构形面部处理机制的参与会自动引导注视到眼睛。
