Searching for a perceived stare in the crowd

Gaze direction can be represented in terms not only of local-feature information (ie the location of the pupil in the eye socket), but also of an emergent property---whether the perceived gaze direction is straight or averted. To examine whether this emergent property is preferentially accessed when searching for an oddly directed gaze, we experimentally manipulated the local-feature information and the emergent property independently, in order to investigate the influences of both types of information on visual searches for an oddly directed gaze. We found that the primary determinant of search efficiency was not the local-feature information of eye region, but the emergent property--the perceived direction of the gaze. This finding is consistent with the idea that important social signals are recognised primarily by their emergent properties.