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.     

Processing of compound-word characters in reading Chinese: An eye-movement-contingent display change study

Readers’ eye movements were monitored as they read Chinese two-constituent compound words in sentence contexts. The first compound-word constituent was either an infrequent character with a highly predictable second constituent or a frequent character with an unpredictable second constituent. The parafoveal preview of the second constituent was manipulated, with four preview conditions: identical to the correct form; a semantically related character to the second constituent; a semantically unrelated character to the second constituent; and a pseudocharacter. An invisible boundary was set between the two constituents; when the eyes moved across the boundary, the previewed character was changed to its intended form. The main findings were that preview effects occurred for the second constituent of the compound word. Providing an incorrect preview of the second constituent affected fixations on the first constituent, but only when the second constituent was predictable from the first. The frequency of the initial character of the compound constrained the identity of the second character, and this in turn modulated the extent to which the semantic characteristics of the preview influenced processing of the second constituent and the compound word as a whole. The results are considered in relation to current accounts of Chinese compound-word recognition and the constraint hypothesis of Hyönä, Bertram, and Pollatsek (2004 Hyönä, J., Bertram, R. and Pollatsek, A. 2004. Are long compound words identified serially via their constituents? Evidence from an eye-movement-contingent display change study. Memory & Cognition, 32: 523–532. (doi:10.3758/BF03195844)[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). We conclude that word identification in Chinese is flexible, and parafoveal processing of upcoming characters is influenced both by the characteristics of the fixated character and by its relationship with the characters in the parafovea.     

Orthographic and phonological preview benefits: Parafoveal processing in skilled and less-skilled deaf readers

Many deaf individuals do not develop the high-level reading skills that will allow them to fully take part into society. To attempt to explain this widespread difficulty in the deaf population, much research has honed in on the use of phonological codes during reading. The hypothesis that the use of phonological codes is associated with good reading skills in deaf readers, though not well supported, still lingers in the literature. We investigated skilled and less-skilled adult deaf readers' processing of orthographic and phonological codes in parafoveal vision during reading by monitoring their eye movements and using the boundary paradigm. Orthographic preview benefits were found in early measures of reading for skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less-skilled deaf readers, but only skilled hearing readers processed phonological codes in parafoveal vision. Crucially, skilled and less-skilled deaf readers showed a very similar pattern of preview benefits during reading. These results support the notion that reading difficulties in deaf adults are not linked to their failure to activate phonological codes during reading.     

Serial and parallel processing in reading: Investigating the effects of parafoveal orthographic information on nonisolated word recognition

We present a novel lexical decision task and three boundary paradigm eye-tracking experiments that clarify the picture of parallel processing in word recognition in context. First, we show that lexical decision is facilitated by associated letter information to the left and right of the word, with no apparent hemispheric specificity. Second, we show that parafoveal preview of a repeat of word n at word n + 1 facilitates reading of word n relative to a control condition with an unrelated word at word n + 1. Third, using a version of the boundary paradigm that allowed for a regressive eye movement, we show no parafoveal “postview” effect on reading word n of repeating word n at word n – 1. Fourth, we repeat the second experiment but compare the effects of parafoveal previews consisting of a repeated word n with a transposed central bigram (e.g., caot for coat) and a substituted central bigram (e.g., ceit for coat), showing the latter to have a deleterious effect on processing word n, thereby demonstrating that the parafoveal preview effect is at least orthographic and not purely visual.     

Kinematics matters: A new eye-tracking investigation of animated triangles

Eye movements have been recently recorded in participants watching animated triangles in short movies that normally evoke mentalizing (Frith–Happé animations). Authors have found systematic differences in oculomotor behaviour according to the degree of mental state attribution to these triangles: Participants made longer fixations and looked longer at intentional triangles than at triangles moving randomly. However, no study has yet explored kinematic characteristics of Frith–Happé animations and their influence on eye movements. In a first experiment, we have run a quantitative kinematic analysis of Frith–Happé animations and found that the time triangles spent moving and the distance between them decreased with the mentalistic complexity of their movements. In a second experiment, we have recorded eye movements in 17 participants watching Frith–Happé animations and found that some differences in fixation durations and in the proportion of gaze allocated to triangles between the different kinds of animations were entirely explained by low-level kinematic confounds. We finally present a new eye-tracking measure of visual attention, triangle pursuit duration, which does differentiate the different types of animations even after taking into account kinematic cofounds. However, some idiosyncratic kinematic properties of the Frith–Happé animations prevent an entirely satisfactory interpretation of these results. The different eye-tracking measures are interpreted as implicit and line measures of the processing of animate movements.     

Can hearing puter activate pupil? Phonological competition and the processing of reduced spoken words in spontaneous conversations

In listeners' daily communicative exchanges, they most often hear casual speech, in which words are often produced with fewer segments, rather than the careful speech used in most psycholinguistic experiments. Three experiments examined phonological competition during the recognition of reduced forms such as [pjut?r] for computer using a target-absent variant of the visual world paradigm. Listeners' eye movements were tracked upon hearing canonical and reduced forms as they looked at displays of four printed words. One of the words was phonologically similar to the canonical pronunciation of the target word, one word was similar to the reduced pronunciation, and two words served as unrelated distractors. When spoken targets were presented in isolation (Experiment 1) and in sentential contexts (Experiment 2), competition was modulated as a function of the target word form. When reduced targets were presented in sentential contexts, listeners were probabilistically more likely to first fixate reduced-form competitors before shifting their eye gaze to canonical-form competitors. Experiment 3, in which the original /p/ from [pjut?r] was replaced with a “real” onset /p/, showed an effect of cross-splicing in the late time window. We conjecture that these results fit best with the notion that speech reductions initially activate competitors that are similar to the phonological surface form of the reduction, but that listeners nevertheless can exploit fine phonetic detail to reconstruct strongly reduced forms to their canonical counterparts.     

Why does gaze enhance mimicry? Placing gaze-mimicry effects in relation to other gaze phenomena

Eye gaze is a powerful signal, which exerts a mixture of arousal, attentional, and social effects on the observer. We recently found a behavioural interaction between eye contact and mimicry where direct gaze rapidly enhanced mimicry of hand movements ). Here, we report two detailed investigations of this effect. In Experiment 1, we compared the effects of “direct gaze”, “averted gaze”, and “gaze to the acting hand” on mimicry and manipulated the sequence of gaze events within a trial. Only direct gaze immediately before the hand action enhanced mimicry. In Experiment 2, we examined the enhancement of mimicry when direct gaze is followed by a “blink” or by “shut eyes”, or by “occluded eyes”. Enhanced mimicry relative to baseline was seen only in the blink condition. Together, these results suggest that ongoing social engagement is necessary for enhanced mimicry. These findings allow us to place the gaze-enhancement effect in the context of other reported gaze phenomena. We suggest that this effect is similar to previously reported audience effects, but is less similar to ostensive cueing effects. This has important implications for our theories of the relationships between social cues and imitation.     

The transference of visual search between two unrelated tasks: Measuring the temporal characteristics of carry-over

Investigations into the persistence of top-down control settings do not accurately reflect the nature of dynamic tasks. They typically involve extended practice with an initial task, and this initial task usually shares similar stimuli with a second task. Recent work shows that visual attention and search can be affected by limited exposure to a preceding, unrelated task, and the current study explored the temporal characteristics of this “carry-over” effect. Thirty-four participants completed one, four, or eight simple letter searches and then searched a natural scene. The spatial layout of letters influenced spread of search in the pictures, and this was further impacted by the time spent in the initial task, yet the carry-over effect diminished quickly. The results have implications for theories of top-down control and models that attempt to predict search in natural scenes. They are also relevant to real-world tasks in which performance is closely related to visual attention and search.     

Temporal dynamics of the eye–voice span and eye movement control during oral reading

The distance between eye movements and articulation during oral reading, commonly referred to as the eye–voice span, has been a classic issue of experimental reading research since Buswell (1921). To examine the influence of the span on eye movement control, synchronised recordings of eye position and speech production were obtained during fluent oral reading. The viewing of a word almost always preceded its articulation, and the interval between the onset of a word's fixation and the onset of its articulation was approximately 500 ms. The identification and articulation of a word were closely coupled, and the fixation–speech interval was regulated through immediate adjustments of word viewing duration, unless the interval was relatively long. In this case, the lag between identification and articulation was often reduced through a regression that moved the eyes back in the text. These results indicate that models of eye movement control during oral reading need to include a mechanism that maintains a close linkage between the identification and articulation of words through continuous oculomotor adjustments.