Gobel Matthias S, Kim Heejung S, Richardson Daniel C
Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT, London, UK.
Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660, USA.
Cognition. 2015 Mar;136:359-64. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.11.040. Epub 2014 Dec 22.
Ears cannot speak, lips cannot hear, but eyes can both signal and perceive. For human beings, this dual function makes the eyes a remarkable tool for social interaction. For psychologists trying to understand eye movements, however, their dual function causes a fundamental ambiguity. In order to contrast signaling and perceiving functions of social gaze, we manipulated participants' beliefs about social context as they looked at the same stimuli. Participants watched videos of faces of higher and lower ranked people, while they themselves were filmed. They believed either that the recordings of them would later be seen by the people in the videos or that no-one would see them. This manipulation significantly changed how participants responded to the social rank of the target faces. Specifically, when they believed that the targets would later be looking at them, and so could use gaze to signal information, participants looked proportionally less at the eyes of the higher ranked targets. We conclude that previous claims about eye movements and face perception that are based on a single social context can only be generalized with caution. A complete understanding of face perception needs to address both functions of social gaze.
耳朵无法说话，嘴唇无法聆听，但眼睛既能发出信号又能感知信息。对人类而言，这种双重功能使眼睛成为社交互动的非凡工具。然而，对于试图理解眼球运动的心理学家来说，眼睛的这种双重功能会导致一个根本性的模糊问题。为了对比社交注视的信号功能和感知功能，我们在参与者观看相同刺激物时，操控他们对社交情境的信念。参与者观看地位较高和较低的人的面部视频，同时他们自己也被拍摄下来。他们要么相信自己的录像稍后会被视频中的人看到，要么相信没人会看到。这种操控显著改变了参与者对目标面部社会地位的反应。具体而言，当他们相信目标稍后会看着他们，因此可以用注视来传达信息时，参与者相对较少地注视地位较高的目标的眼睛。我们得出结论，先前基于单一社交情境对眼球运动和面部感知的论断只能谨慎地加以推广。对面部感知的全面理解需要兼顾社交注视的两种功能。
