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Attention Capture by Direct Gaze is Robust to Context and Task Demands

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06-nihms3898.pdf (496.17 KB)

Date

2012-01-10

Authors

Itier, Roxane J.
Palancia, Adam

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Springer

Abstract

Eye-tracking was used to investigate whether gaze direction would influence the visual scanning of faces, when presented in the context of a full character, in different social settings, and with different task demands. Participants viewed individual computer agents against either a blank background or a bar scene setting, during both a free-viewing task and an attractiveness rating task for each character. Faces with a direct gaze were viewed longer than faces with an averted gaze regardless of body context, social settings, and task demands. Additionally, participants evaluated characters with a direct gaze as more attractive than characters with an averted gaze. These results, obtained with pictures of computer agents rather than real people, suggest that direct gaze is a powerful attention grabbing stimulus that is robust to background context or task demands.

Description

The final publication is available at Springer via https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10919-011-0128-z.

Keywords

Gaze direction, Eye tracking, Body scanning

LC Keywords

Citation

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10012/11429
 https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10919-011-0128-z
 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4072644/

Collections

Waterloo Research
Psychology