Doherty Martin J, McIntyre Alex H, Langton Stephen R H
School of Psychology, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK.
School of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, UK.
Cognition. 2015 Apr;137:72-80. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.01.001. Epub 2015 Jan 22.
Two experiments examined how the different cues to gaze direction contribute to children's abilities to follow and make explicit judgements about gaze. In each study participants were shown blurred images of faces containing only luminance cues to gaze direction, line-drawn images containing only fine-grained detail supporting a geometric analysis of gaze direction, and unmanipulated images. In Experiment 1a, 2- and 3-year olds showed gaze-cued orienting of attention in response to unmanipulated and blurred faces, but not line-drawn faces. Adult participants showed cueing effects to line drawn faces as well as the other two types of face cue in Experiment 1b. In Experiment 2, 2-year-olds were poor at judging towards which of four objects blurred and line-drawn faces were gazing, whereas 3- and 4-year-olds performed above chance with these faces. All age groups performed above chance with unmanipulated images. These findings are consistent with an early-developing luminance-based mechanism, which supports gaze following, but which cannot initially support explicit judgements, and a later-developing mechanism, additionally using geometric cues in the eye, which supports explicit judgements about gaze.
两项实验研究了不同的注视方向线索如何影响儿童追随注视以及对注视做出明确判断的能力。在每项研究中，向参与者展示了包含仅用于注视方向的亮度线索的面部模糊图像、仅包含支持注视方向几何分析的细粒度细节的线条画图像以及未处理的图像。在实验1a中，2岁和3岁儿童对未处理的和模糊的面部表现出基于注视线索的注意力定向，但对线条画面部没有表现出这种定向。在实验1b中，成年参与者对线条画面部以及其他两种面部线索都表现出线索效应。在实验2中，2岁儿童难以判断模糊和线条画面部注视的是四个物体中的哪一个，而3岁和4岁儿童在这些面部上的表现高于随机水平。所有年龄组在未处理图像上的表现都高于随机水平。这些发现与一种早期发展的基于亮度的机制一致，该机制支持注视追随，但最初不能支持明确判断；还有一种后期发展的机制，该机制额外利用眼睛中的几何线索，支持对注视的明确判断。
