Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Cognition. 2021 Feb;207:104519. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104519. Epub 2020 Nov 21.
Direct gaze - someone looking at you - is an important and subjectively-salient stimulus. Its processing is thought to be enhanced by the brain's internalised predictions - priors - that effectively specify it as the most likely gaze direction. Current consensus holds that, befitting its presumed importance, direct gaze attracts attention more powerfully than other gazes. Conversely, some Predictive Coding (PC) models, in which exogenous attention is drawn to stimuli that violate predictions, may be construed as making the opposite claim - i.e., exogenous attention should be biased away from direct gaze (which conforms to internal predictions), toward averted gaze (which does not). Here, searching displays with salient, 'odd-one-out' gazes, we observed attentional bias (in rapid, initial saccades) toward averted gaze, as would be expected by PC models. However, this pattern obtained only when conditions highlighted gaze-uniqueness. We speculate that, in our experiments, task requirements determined how prediction influenced perception.
直接注视——即有人看着你——是一种重要的、主观显著的刺激。人们认为，大脑的内部预测（先验）增强了对其的处理，这些预测有效地将其指定为最有可能的注视方向。目前的共识认为，直接注视符合其预期的重要性，比其他注视更能有力地吸引注意力。相反，一些预测编码（PC）模型认为，外源性注意会被违反预测的刺激吸引，这可能会得出相反的结论，即外源性注意应该偏离直接注视（与内部预测一致），偏向回避注视（不符合内部预测）。在这里，我们观察了带有显著“异类”注视的搜索显示，发现了回避注视的注意力偏向（在快速的初始扫视中），这符合 PC 模型的预测。然而，只有在突出注视独特性的条件下，才会出现这种模式。我们推测，在我们的实验中，任务要求决定了预测如何影响感知。
