I just love the attention: implicit preference for direct eye contact

Seven studies used the Implicit Association Test to measure preference for gaze direction. For faces with neutral expressions, people clearly preferred eyes looking towards them compared to eyes gazing to the right or left (Experiment 1). This preference remained for faces shown turned to the side (Experiment 2) and upside-down (Experiment 3). Even angry faces were preferred with direct compared to averted gaze (Experiments 4 and 5). Furthermore, preference for eye contact did not correlate to performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) or the Autism Quotient (AQ); note performance on the RMET and the AQ was only weakly correlated although both are claimed to measure social cognition. When the faces were replaced by coloured shapes (Experiment 6) or arrows (Experiment 7) people showed a weaker preference for the category label “looking at you” versus “looking to the side”. Overall, people revealed a robust preference for direct rather than averted gaze which generalized across face pose and expression. Together with a weaker preference for arrows pointing towards them, this is consistent with people having an implicit preference for self-directed attention.     

Facial attractiveness biases the perception of eye contact

Attractive faces are appealing: We like to look at them, and we like to be looked at by them. We presented attractive and unattractive smiling and neutral faces containing identical eye regions with different gaze directions. Participants judged whether or not a face looked directly at them. Overall, attractive faces increased participants' tendency to perceive eye contact, consistent with a self-referential positivity bias. However, attractiveness effects were modulated by facial expression and gender: For female faces, observers more likely perceived eye contact in attractive than unattractive faces, independent of expression. For male faces, attractiveness effects were limited to neutral expressions and were absent in smiling faces. A signal detection analysis elucidated a systematic pattern in which (a) smiling faces, but not highly attractive faces, reduced sensitivity in gaze perception overall, and (b) attractiveness had a more consistent impact on bias than sensitivity measures. We conclude that combined influences of attractiveness, expression, and gender determine the formation of an overall impression when deciding which individual's interest in oneself may be beneficial and should be reciprocated.     

Eye contact does not facilitate detection in children with autism

Eye contact is crucial in achieving social communication. Deviant patterns of eye contact behavior are found in individuals with autism, who suffer from severe social and communicative deficits. This study used a visual oddball paradigm to investigate whether children with high functioning autism have difficulty in detecting mutual gaze under experimental conditions. The results revealed that children with autism were no better at detecting direct gaze than at detecting averted gaze, which is unlike normal children. This suggests that whereas typically developing children have the ability to detect direct gaze, children with autism do not. This might result in altered eye-contact behavior, which hampers subsequent development of social and communicative skills.     

Genuine eye contact elicits self-referential processing

The effect of eye contact on self-awareness was investigated with implicit measures based on the use of first-person singular pronouns in sentences. The measures were proposed to tap into self-referential processing, that is, information processing associated with self-awareness. In addition, participants filled in a questionnaire measuring explicit self-awareness. In Experiment 1, the stimulus was a video clip showing another person and, in Experiment 2, the stimulus was a live person. In both experiments, participants were divided into two groups and presented with the stimulus person either making eye contact or gazing downward, depending on the group assignment. During the task, the gaze stimulus was presented before each trial of the pronoun-selection task. Eye contact was found to increase the use of first-person pronouns, but only when participants were facing a real person, not when they were looking at a video of a person. No difference in self-reported self-awareness was found between the two gaze direction groups in either experiment. The results indicate that eye contact elicits self-referential processing, but the effect may be stronger, or possibly limited to, live interaction.     

Newborns' preference for goal-directed actions

The central role of sensory-motor representations in cognitive functions is almost universally accepted. However, determining the link between motor execution and its sensory counterpart and when, during ontogenesis, this link originates are still under investigation. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether at birth this link is already present and 2-day-old newborns are able to discriminate between visual cues indicating goal-directed or non-goal-directed actions. Here, with a preferential looking technique, a hand grasping a ball was the observed movement and we orthogonally manipulated the three factors necessary to successfully reach the goal: (a) presence of the ball, (b) direction of the arm movement, and (c) hand shaping. Results indicated that newborns orient more frequently and look longer at a hand shape for whole hand prehension but only when the movement is directed away from the body and toward the external world. In addition, newborns prefer the away from the body movement only when the object is present. We argue that newborns prefer a movement directed toward the external world only when it may develop into a purposeful movement because of the presence of the to-be-grasped object. Overall, our results support the existence of primitive sensory-motor associations since the first days after birth.     

Understanding the referential nature of looking: infants' preference for object-directed gaze

In four experiments, we investigated whether 9-month-old infants are sensitive to the relationship between gaze direction and object location and whether this sensitivity depends on the presence of communicative cues like eye contact. Infants observed a face, which repeatedly shifted its eyes either toward, or away from, unpredictably appearing objects. We found that they looked longer at the face when the gaze shifts were congruent with the location of the object. A second experiment ruled out that this effect was simply due to spatial congruency, while a third and a fourth experiment revealed that a preceding period of eye contact is required to elicit the gaze-object congruency effect. These results indicate that infants at this age can encode eye direction in referential terms in the presence of communication cues and are biased to attend to scenes with object-directed gaze.     

The development of preferences for own-race versus other-race faces in 3-, 6- and 9-month-old Caucasian infants

Visual preferences for pairs of African and Caucasian faces were repeatedly assessed in 3-, 6- and 9-month-old Caucasian infants with a preferential looking paradigm. Two different patterns of preference development were found: First, the spontaneous own-race preference at three months reported in the literature tilts to a preference for other-race faces at nine months passing through a null-preference at six months. This replicates the pattern recently reported for Asian infants [Liu et al. (2015). Development of visual preference for own- versus other-race faces in infancy. Developmental Psychology. doi:10.1037/a0038835]. Second, at all three ages fixation time towards Caucasian faces significantly reduces across the consecutive trial presentation. This is a similar effect as in novelty preference studies to occur after a sufficiently long familiarization phase. Both patterns can be explained in terms of an advantaged own-race face processing with the emerging Other-Race-Effect.     

Mentalizing eye contact with a face on a video: Gaze direction does not influence autonomic arousal

Recent research has revealed enhanced autonomic and subjective responses to eye contact only when perceiving another live person. However, these enhanced responses to eye contact are abolished if the viewer believes that the other person is not able to look back at the viewer. We purported to investigate whether this “genuine” eye contact effect can be reproduced with pre‐recorded videos of stimulus persons. Autonomic responses, gaze behavior, and subjective self‐assessments were measured while participants viewed pre‐recorded video persons with direct or averted gaze, imagined that the video person was real, and mentalized that the person could see them or not. Pre‐recorded videos did not evoke similar physiological or subjective eye contact effect as previously observed with live persons, not even when the participants were mentalizing being seen by the person. Gaze tracking results showed, however, increased attention allocation to faces with direct gaze compared to averted gaze directions. The results suggest that elicitation of the physiological arousal in response to genuine eye contact seems to require spontaneous experience of seeing and of being seen by another individual.