Selective Gaze Following In Conflicting Multi-gaze Scenes

Eye is a medium to deliver rich information.Human’s ability to effectively perceive and interpret messages from others’ eyes has been generated through the process of evolution.People would automatically redirect their visual attention by following others’ gaze direction.Researchers named this phenomenon as "Gaze following" and others’gaze as "Gaze cue".Gaze following plays an important role in developing the ability of facial expression recognition,language acquisition,and interpersonal communication.Comparing to single gaze scenes in previous studies,most of the scenes in real life are interactive ones including many eye gazes directing to various directions.In order to achieve a harmonious interaction,it’s quite critical for visual system to resolve the conflict among these differently-directed gazes.In this case,previous studies concerning single gaze scene were unable to provide integrated explanation and prediction for a complex scene with more than one gaze cue in it,because the information complexity in real scenes was simplified.The classical gaze cue paradigm was optimized in the current research by setting a multi-gaze scene instead of the original single gaze scene.Taking gaze cue effect as the dependent variable,I changed either facial expression or the quantity variance of conflicting gazes to manipulate the cuing strength of these gazes,and systematically investigated gaze following phenomenon under the circumstance with many conflicting gazes.Current research was divided into three studies.Firstly,in Study 1,the gaze following effect was explored in a dual-gaze scene by taking fear expression as an example,and then its occurring phase was investigated in Study 2.Finally in Study 3,I expanded the dual-gaze scene to a multi-gaze scene,to further explore how the quantity variance of conflicting gazes influences selective gaze following phenomenon.The results showed that:(1)facial expression impacts the selection in conflicting multi-gaze scene,and the gaze cue with fear expression is selected to be followed.(2)compared to happy expression,fear expression which is much closely related to human survival can enhance gaze’s cuing strength.(3)in a conflicting multi-gaze scene,the majority has an advantage in cuing strength over the minority,hence people tend to follow majority’s gaze direction.(4)the selection among conflicting gaze cues occurs in late response phase.These findings suggest that in a conflicting multi-gaze scene,human visual system can manipulate gaze’s cuing strength by attaching either fear expression or quantity variance to the scene,and finally direct the selective gaze following.