Edwards S Gareth, Seibert Nathalie, Bayliss Andrew P
School of Psychology, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.
Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2020 Jan;73(1):80-90. doi: 10.1177/1747021819867901. Epub 2019 Aug 18.
Efficiently judging where someone else is looking is important for social interactions, allowing us a window into their mental state by establishing joint attention. Previous work has shown that judging the gaze direction of a non-foveally presented face is facilitated when the eyes of that face are directed towards the centre of the scene. This finding has been interpreted as an example of the human bias for misattributing observed ambiguous gaze signals as self-directed eye-contact. To test this interpretation against an alternative hypothesis that the facilitation is instead driven by the establishment of joint attention, we conducted two experiments in which we varied the participants' fixation location. In both experiments, we replicated the previous finding of facilitated gaze discrimination when the participants fixated centrally. However, this facilitation was abolished when participants fixated peripheral fixation crosses (Experiment 1) and reversed when participants fixated peripheral images of real-world objects (Experiment 2). Based on these data, we propose that the facilitation effect is consistent with the interpretation that gaze discrimination is facilitated when joint attention is established. This finding therefore extends previous work showing that engaging in joint attention facilitates a range of social cognitive processes.
有效地判断他人的注视方向对于社交互动至关重要，它能通过建立共同注意为我们提供了解他人心理状态的窗口。先前的研究表明，当一张非中央凹呈现的脸的眼睛朝向场景中心时，判断其注视方向会更容易。这一发现被解释为人类将观察到的模糊注视信号误归为自我导向的眼神接触的偏差的一个例子。为了对照另一种假设（即这种促进作用是由共同注意的建立驱动的）来检验这一解释，我们进行了两项实验，在实验中改变了参与者的注视位置。在两项实验中，我们都重现了之前的发现，即当参与者集中注视时，注视辨别更容易。然而，当参与者注视周边的注视十字（实验1）时，这种促进作用消失了；当参与者注视真实世界物体的周边图像（实验2）时，促进作用则相反。基于这些数据，我们提出促进作用效应与这样一种解释一致，即当建立共同注意时，注视辨别会更容易。因此，这一发现扩展了先前的研究，表明参与共同注意有助于一系列社会认知过程。
