Clifford Colin W G, Palmer Colin J
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2018 Nov 9;9:2165. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02165. eCollection 2018.
The direction of another person's gaze provides us with a strong cue to their intentions and future actions, and, correspondingly, the human visual system has evolved to extract information about others' gaze from the sensory stream. The perception of gaze is a remarkably plastic process: adaptation to a particular direction of gaze over a matter of seconds or minutes can cause marked aftereffects in our sense of where other people are looking. In this review, we first discuss the measurement, specificity, and neural correlates of gaze aftereffects. We then examine how studies that have explored the perceptual and neural determinants of gaze aftereffects have provided key insights into the nature of how other people's gaze direction is represented within the visual hierarchy. This includes the level of perceptual representation of gaze direction (e.g., relating to integrated vs. local facial features) and the interaction of this system with higher-level social-cognitive functions, such as theory of mind. Moreover, computational modeling of data from behavioral studies of gaze adaptation allows us to make inferences about the functional principles that govern the neural encoding of gaze direction. This in turn provides a foundation for testing computational theories of neuropsychiatric conditions in which gaze processing is compromised, such as autism.
他人的注视方向为我们了解他们的意图和未来行动提供了有力线索，相应地，人类视觉系统已经进化到能够从感官信息流中提取有关他人注视的信息。注视感知是一个极具可塑性的过程：在几秒或几分钟内适应特定的注视方向会在我们对他人目光落点的感知上产生明显的后效。在这篇综述中，我们首先讨论注视后效的测量、特异性和神经关联。然后，我们将考察那些探究注视后效的感知和神经决定因素的研究如何为他人注视方向在视觉层级中如何被表征的本质提供了关键见解。这包括注视方向的感知表征水平（例如，与整体面部特征和局部面部特征的关系）以及该系统与更高层次社会认知功能（如心理理论）的相互作用。此外，对注视适应行为研究数据的计算建模使我们能够推断出支配注视方向神经编码的功能原理。这反过来又为测试神经精神疾病（如自闭症）中注视处理受损的计算理论奠定了基础。
