School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia.
Proc Biol Sci. 2022 Aug 10;289(1980):20221230. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2022.1230.
A person's focus of attention is conveyed by the direction of their eyes and face, providing a simple visual cue fundamental to social interaction. A growing body of research examines the visual mechanisms that encode the direction of another person's gaze as we observe them. Here we investigate the of these mechanisms, by testing the spatial selectivity of sensory adaptation to gaze direction. Human observers were adapted to faces with averted gaze presented in one visual hemifield, then tested in their perception of gaze direction for faces presented in the same or opposite hemifield. Adaptation caused strong, repulsive perceptual aftereffects, but only for faces presented in the same hemifield as the adapter. This occurred even though adapting and test stimuli were in the same external location across saccades. Hence, there was clear evidence for adaptation and a relative lack of either or adaptation. These results indicate that adaptable representations of gaze direction in the human visual system have retinotopic spatial receptive fields. This strategy of coding others' direction of gaze with positional specificity relative to one's own eye position may facilitate key functions of gaze perception, such as socially cued shifts in visual attention.
人的注意力焦点通过眼睛和面部的方向来传达，这为社交互动提供了一个简单的视觉线索，是社交互动的基础。越来越多的研究关注编码他人注视方向的视觉机制，我们在观察他人时会用到这些机制。在这里，我们通过测试对注视方向的感觉适应的空间选择性来研究这些机制。人类观察者适应了在一个视野中呈现的侧视面孔，然后在相同或相反的视野中呈现面孔时，测试他们对注视方向的感知。适应会引起强烈的、排斥性的知觉后效，但仅适用于与适配器相同视野中的面孔。即使在扫视过程中适应和测试刺激处于相同的外部位置，也是如此。因此，有明确的证据表明存在适应，而相对缺乏或适应。这些结果表明，人类视觉系统中注视方向的可适应表示具有视网膜空间感受野。这种用相对于自己眼睛位置的位置特异性来编码他人注视方向的策略，可能有助于注视感知的关键功能，例如社会提示的视觉注意力转移。
