Department of Developmental and Social Psychology University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2020 Mar 16;10(1):4777. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-61619-6.
Establishing eye contact with an individual can subsequently lead to a stronger gaze-mediated orienting effect. However, studies exploring this phenomenon have, so far, only assessed manual responses and focused on covert attention - namely, without eye movements. Here, in two experiments, we explored for the first time whether eye contact can also impact on overt attention in an oculomotor task. This approach has two main advantages, in that it relies on more sensitive, online measures of attention allocation and it better mimics real life settings. Participants performed leftwards and rightwards eye movements in response to a central cue. Furthermore, a task-irrelevant central face established - or not - eye contact with the participant, and then averted its gaze either leftwards or rightwards. Hence, eye movement direction was either congruent or incongruent with that of the gaze stimulus. In both experiments, a gaze following behaviour emerged - specifically, smaller saccadic latencies and a greater accuracy emerged on congruent than on incongruent trials - but its magnitude was not modulated by eye contact. However, in Experiment 2 - in which the different eye contact conditions were presented intermixed rather than blocked, thus making eye contact contextually salient - eye contact led to an overall decrement of saccadic latencies and enhanced the reflexive component of gaze following. Taken together, these results provide novel evidence indicating that eye contact can impact on both eye movements programming and overt gaze following mechanisms, at least when eye contact is made contextually salient.
与个体建立眼神接触随后会导致更强的目光介导的定向效应。然而，到目前为止，探索这一现象的研究仅评估了手动反应，并专注于隐蔽注意力，即没有眼球运动。在这里，在两项实验中，我们首次探索了眼神接触是否也可以在眼动任务中影响显性注意力。这种方法有两个主要优势，它依赖于更敏感的、在线的注意力分配测量方法，并且更好地模拟了现实生活环境。参与者根据中央提示向左或向右进行眼球运动。此外，一个与任务无关的中央面孔与参与者建立或不建立眼神接触，然后将目光向左或向右转移。因此，眼球运动的方向与注视刺激的方向一致或不一致。在两项实验中，出现了一种追随行为——具体来说，在一致条件下，眼跳潜伏期更小，准确性更高，而在不一致条件下则更低——但注视接触并没有调节这种行为的幅度。然而，在实验 2 中——其中不同的注视接触条件混合呈现，而不是分块呈现，从而使注视接触在语境中更加突出——注视接触导致眼跳潜伏期整体下降，并增强了追随的反射成分。总的来说，这些结果提供了新的证据，表明眼神接触至少在语境中突出注视接触时，可以影响眼球运动编程和显性的注视追随机制。
