Article

Is there an innate gaze module? Evidence from human neonates

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Abstract

Evidence from various fields that suggests humans have a specialized neural system dedicated to perceiving another’s eyes and detecting the direction in which they are gazing. The evidence is, however, inconclusive about whether this system is already operating in neonates. 105 neonates were presented with two photographs separately. One was a female adult face with the eyes open and the other was the same face with the eyes closed. Results indicated that the neonates spent significantly more time looking at the photograph with the eyes open than at the photograph with the eyes closed. This result may reflect that neonates have a special neural mechanism that detects eye-like stimuli in the environment and orients attention towards them. This new visual preference in infants warrants further research.

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... Despite the theoretical and practical importance of gazetriggered social attention, its nature remains elusive. It has been proposed that there might exist a quick eye direction detector [3] or an innate social module [12] that detects eye-like stimuli in the environment and orients attention accordingly. Evidence supporting this view has found that gaze-triggered social attention is reflexive [13,14], independent of consciousness [15,16], and heritable [17]. ...
... Furthermore, social attention in adulthood resembles endogenous attention as it persists over a relatively long interval [28] and can be modulated by multiple social factors [29]. It has therefore been proposed that the emergence and development of the gaze-triggered social attention might arise from the mutual contributions of the innate social module [3,12] and the reinforcement learning through social experience [30,31] or perceptual association [32]. Indeed, recent studies have demonstrated that social attention triggered by gaze cues not only is supported by innate and genetically inherited mechanisms tuned to social processing [17,33] but also heavily relies on learned and general attentional mechanisms shared by nonsocial processing (e.g., arrow cues). ...
... Studies across various animal species have demonstrated their ability to follow gaze directions, a behavior considered a fundamental social attention skill [86], which appears to have emerged early in evolutionary history and remains conserved across species [87]. In humans, research on newborns and infants has revealed their capacity to discriminate [12,88] and respond to eye gaze [89], even when the eyes were presented unconsciously [90]. Furthermore, the impairment of these innate modules has been suggested to contribute to ASD [10]. ...
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Typically developing (TD) individuals can readily orient attention according to others’ eye-gaze direction, an ability known as social attention, which involves both innate and acquired components. To distinguish between these two components, we used a critical flicker fusion technique to render gaze cues invisible to participants, thereby largely reducing influences from consciously acquired strategies. Results revealed that both visible and invisible gaze cues could trigger attentional orienting in TD adults (aged 20 to 30 years) and children (aged 6 to 12 years). Intriguingly, only the ability to involuntarily respond to invisible gaze cues was negatively correlated with autistic traits among all TD participants. This ability was substantially impaired in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and in children with high autistic traits. No such association or reduction was observed with visible gaze cues. These findings provide compelling evidence for the functional demarcation of conscious and unconscious gaze-triggered attentional orienting that emerges early in life and develops into adulthood, shedding new light on the differentiation of the innate and acquired aspects of social attention. Moreover, they contribute to a comprehensive understanding of social endophenotypes of ASD.
... Still, newborns demonstrate both social and attentional biases, a basic wiring thought to pave the way for the development of gaze following. For instance, newborns will engage in dyadic eye contact; they prefer looking at faces with open eyes (Batki et al., 2000), and they distinguish between direct and averted gaze, showing a preference for the former (Farroni et al., 2002;Farroni et al., 2004). Novel findings even suggest that third-trimester human fetuses demonstrate a visual face preference (Reid et al., 2017) when represented in its most basic form, see Johnson and Morton (1991). ...
... There is some support for this perspective. For example, Farroni et al. (2002) and Batki et al. (2000) demonstrated that newborns preferred looking at faces that engaged in direct gaze, and Farroni et al. (2002) that 4-month-old infants show enhanced neural processing in response to faces with direct gaze. However, studies demonstrate that infants may respond to perceived motion rather than gaze (Farroni et al., 2000) and the fact that infants only start to incorporate the eye as a directional cue at the age of 1 year (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2005;Caron et al., 2002;Doherty et al., 2009;Moore & Corkum, 1998;Thorup et al., 2016;Tomasello et al., 2007;) speaks against this view. ...
... In the 0-3 months range, the main alarm bells revealed by the screening form concern the child's ability, while awake, to pay attention to the world around her/him and to interact with it, such as, for example, the difficulty to adapt when held in the arms, to show attention to sounds and colors around her/him, to imitate movements of the parent's mouth and to breastfeeding attachment. These aspects risk having an impact on the development of self-regulation necessary for subsequent learning [38][39][40]. In fact, in children with typical development, in this first trimester of life, we observe the eye gaze as well as the ability to pay attention to objects, to look and respond to a familiar face, until the appearance of the social smile [38][39][40]. ...
... These aspects risk having an impact on the development of self-regulation necessary for subsequent learning [38][39][40]. In fact, in children with typical development, in this first trimester of life, we observe the eye gaze as well as the ability to pay attention to objects, to look and respond to a familiar face, until the appearance of the social smile [38][39][40]. Looking at the adult's mouth and imitating some facial movements represent the precursors of preverbal communicative intentionality [41]. ...
... In the 0-3 months range, the main alarm bells revealed by the screening form concern the child's ability, while awake, to pay attention to the world around her/him and to interact with it, such as, for example, the difficulty to adapt when held in the arms, to show attention to sounds and colors around her/him, to imitate movements of the parent's mouth and to breastfeeding attachment. These aspects risk having an impact on the development of self-regulation necessary for subsequent learning [38][39][40]. In fact, in children with typical development, in this first trimester of life, we observe the eye gaze as well as the ability to pay attention to objects, to look and respond to a familiar face, until the appearance of the social smile [38][39][40]. ...
... These aspects risk having an impact on the development of self-regulation necessary for subsequent learning [38][39][40]. In fact, in children with typical development, in this first trimester of life, we observe the eye gaze as well as the ability to pay attention to objects, to look and respond to a familiar face, until the appearance of the social smile [38][39][40]. Looking at the adult's mouth and imitating some facial movements represent the precursors of preverbal communicative intentionality [41]. ...
Article
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The main stages of neurodevelopment in the pediatric age are well defined and described in the main books of Pediatrics. In recent years, a significant increase in neurodevelopmental delays and disorders has been described in the pediatric literature. It is also well known that intercepting these situations early allows an early intervention, in many cases fundamental, thanks to an early diagnosis and to obtain the best desired results. In Italy all children have the right to free pediatric assistance thanks to the National Health System (SSN). Periodic check-ups (health reports) are foreseen and regulated from birth to 14 years of age. In this study we verified the usefulness of using specific questionnaires to evaluate neurodevelopment particularly in the first 2 years of life during the periodic check-ups. The possibility for pediatricians to have a tool that is easy to compile and based on the well-known stages of neurodevelopment at the different ages in which health assessments are usually carried out, allows situations of delay or defect to be highlighted, identifying them and allowing those who test positive in screening to be referred to specialist centers. Early identification through a questionnaire in which the main stages of neuro-development are listed for different ages allows pediatricians to select the population that really needs a specialist evaluation, avoiding overloading specialist centers. The results of this study on 1993 subjects aged between 1 and 24 months are preliminary and encourage the use of this rapid and cost-free tool (questionnaire) in the early identification of situations worthy of further diagnostic investigation.
... Facial expressions are one of the first ways of communication between parents and infants prior to language development (Ekman, 1992). From the very beginning of life, infants are more attracted to face-like stimuli than other pattern stimuli (Reid et al., 2017;Simion & Giorgio, 2015;Valenza et al., (1996)), and they prefer faces that look directly at them and with open eyes compared to averted faces and faces with closed eyes (Batki et al., 2000;Farroni et al., 2002). These findings evidence infants' early emerging sensitivity to others' social-communicative cues and their interest in social interactions. ...
... To identify a smile, the area around the eyes plays an important role, especially in displays of an authentic smile (i.e. a Duchenne smile) (Del Giudice & Colle, 2007;Ekman et al., 2002). Developmental literature indicates that human infants show a sensitivity to and preference for eyes from early on (Batki et al., 2000;Farroni et al., 2002;Grossmann, 2017). Moreover, infants' heightened attention to others' eyes in the first year of life was related to concurrent and later higher social competence such as recognition of and response to other's emotions (Pons et al., 2019;Wagner et al., 2013). ...
Article
During the COVID-19 pandemic, face masks became an effective hygienic measure to reduce infection rates. Given the relevance of facial expressions for social interactions, the question arises how face masks affect early social interactions. The current longitudinal study investigated how covering parts of the face might impact infants' responses to others' emotional expressions. Infants who were born during the pandemic were examined at three measurement points at the age of 6, 10 and 14 months. After displaying a neutral facial expression an experimenter smiled at infants while either wearing a mask (mask condition) or not wearing a mask (no mask condition). Infants' change in affect (i.e., negative, neutral, positive) from the neutral to the test phase (i.e., smiling experimenter) was evaluated. Results showed that at 6 and at 10 months infants' behavior did not differ between conditions, whereas at 14 months infants were more likely to show a change from neutral/negative affect to positive affect in the no mask condition than in the mask condition. Moreover, at 14 months infants were less likely to respond positively to the experimenter's smile (across conditions) than at 6 and at 10 months. These findings broaden our understanding of potential effects of mask wearing on the development of face processing and affective communication. Overall, they indicate a developmental trend according to which infants' processing and response to others' positive emotions becomes more selective and differentiated with increasing age.
... Typically developing infants use eye-gaze information effectively at a young age. Days-old infants prefer to look at a face with open rather than closed eyes (Batki et al., 2000) and look longer at direct than averted gaze (Farroni et al., 2002). At around 2 months of age, infants begin to preferentially look at the eyes region of face (Maurer, 1985), and by about 4 months of age they can discriminate direction of eye-gaze and use gaze information to learn about objects and faces (Reid & Striano, 2005). ...
Article
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Autism spectrum condition (ASC) is characterized by atypical attention to eyes and faces, but the onset and impact of these atypicalities remain unclear. This prospective longitudinal study examined face perception in infants who develop ASC (N = 22, female = 5, 100% White) compared to typically developing infants (N = 131, female = 65, 55.6% White), tracking social-cognitive and ASC development through age seven. Reduced interest in direct gaze and eyes during infancy correlated with atypical development of adaptive behaviour at age four and theory of mind at age seven. PCA revealed less integrated processing of facial features and eye-gaze information in ASC infants, potentially impacting their social functioning. These findings highlight the intertwined nature of social-cognitive development and ASC.
... Clearly, our reallife environment is visually more cluttered and diverse than the one presented in our tablet task. Here, however, additional informational sources are available to infer where others are looking; for example, body or head orientation or common ground (Bohn & Köymen, 2018;Moll & Kadipasaoglu, 2013;Osborne-Crowley, 2020 -Cohen, 1995;Batki et al., 2000); that children identify contingencies in social interactions and, in these, get reinforced to follow gaze (Corkum & Moore, 1998;Silverstein et al., 2021;Triesch et al., 2006); or that children are intrinsically socially motivated and simulate their own experiences to understand others (Astor et al., 2020;Friesen & Rao, 2011;Ishikawa et al., 2020;Meltzoff, 2007;Tomasello, 1999). As seen in Prein et al. (2023), precision in gaze following is linked to receptive vocabulary and opportunities for social interaction (e.g., number of siblings and age when entering childcare). ...
Article
Following eye gaze is fundamental for many social‐cognitive abilities, for example, when judging what another agent can or cannot know. While the emergence of gaze following has been thoroughly studied on a group level, we know little about (a) the developmental trajectory beyond infancy and (b) the sources of individual differences. In Study 1, we examined gaze following across the lifespan ( N = 478 3‐ to 19‐year‐olds from Leipzig, Germany; and N = 240 20‐ to 80‐year‐old international, remotely tested adults). We found a steep performance improvement during preschool years, in which children became more precise in locating the attentional focus of an agent. Precision levels then stayed comparably stable throughout adulthood with a minor decline toward old age. In Study 2, we formalized the process of gaze following in a computational cognitive model that allowed us to conceptualize individual differences in a psychologically meaningful way ( N = 60 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds, 50 adults). According to our model, participants estimate pupil angles with varying levels of precision based on observing the pupil location within the agent's eyes. In Study 3, we empirically tested how gaze following relates to vector following in non‐social settings and perspective‐taking abilities ( N = 102 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds). We found that gaze following is associated with both of these abilities but less so with other Theory of Mind tasks. This work illustrates how the combination of reliable measurement instruments and formal theoretical models allows us to explore the in(ter)dependence of core social‐cognitive processes in greater detail. Research Highlights Gaze following develops beyond infancy. The highest precision levels in localizing attentional foci are reached in young adulthood with a slight decrease towards old age. We present a computational model that describes gaze following as a process of estimating pupil angles and the corresponding gaze vectors. The model explains individual differences and recovers signature patterns in the data. To estimate the relation between gaze‐ and vector following, we designed a non‐social vector following task. We found substantial correlations between gaze following and vector following, as well as Level 2 perspective‐taking. Other Theory of Mind tasks did not correlate.
... An alternative view (Batki et al., 2000;Langton et al., 2000;Simion & Giorgio, 2015) has been proposed to explain newborns' preferences for direct gaze. These authors suggested that this preference is due to domaingeneral attentional biases toward the specific structural properties of the features present in a face (i.e., the eyes). ...
Article
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Gaze directed at the observer (direct gaze) is a highly salient social signal. Despite the existence of a preferential orientation toward direct gaze, none of the studies carried out so far seem to have explicitly studied the time course of information processing during gaze direction judgment. In an eye direction judgment task, participants were presented with a sketch of a face. A temporal asynchrony was introduced between the presentation of the eyes and that of the rest of the face. Indeed, the face could be presented before the eyes, the eyes could be presented before the face, or the face and the eyes could be presented simultaneously. In a second time, the face direction was also manipulated. The results suggest that the time course of information processing during eye direction judgment follows a continuum that makes it possible to perceive the eyes first and then to use the facial context to judge the direction of gaze. Furthermore, the congruency between the direction of gaze and that of the face confirms this observation. Although these results are discussed in the light of existing theories about the mechanisms underlying gaze processing, our data provide new information suggesting that, despite their power to capture attention, the eyes probably have to stand out from a more general spatial configuration (i.e., the face) in order for their direction to be adequately processed.
... Research studies assessing looking preferences towards face stimuli in young infants might provide the rational for a speculative hypothesis regarding our results. For instance, ample evidence supports the presence of a general developmental patterns in infants' face exploration during the first year of life, with a preference towards the eyes in newborns and 4-month-old infants (Acerra et al., 2002;Batki et al., 2000) and a shift towards the mouth after 6 months of age (Lewkowicz & Hansen-Tift, 2012). This preference in exploration towards the higher parts of the face could potentially explain the tempered effects of the partial occlusion imposed in faces by the use of a protective facemask in this specific age range. ...
... Mutual gaze is assumed to constitute a key factor in facilitating bonding between child and caregiver [6]. Neonates prefer direct to averted gaze [7] and detect eyelike stimuli in the environment orienting their attention toward them [8]. During face-to-face interactions gaze has important social functions: it allows individuals to modulate transitions between speaker and listener states, to track attentional and emotional states of the partner, and to regulate the level of arousal in the interaction [9]. ...
Article
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Background Eye contact is a fundamental part of social interaction. In clinical studies, it has been observed that patients suffering from depression make less eye contact during interviews than healthy individuals, which could be a factor contributing to their social functioning impairments. Similarly, results from mood induction studies with healthy persons indicate that attention to the eyes diminishes as a function of sad mood. The present screen-based eye-tracking study examined whether depressive symptoms in healthy individuals are associated with reduced visual attention to other persons’ direct gaze during free viewing. Methods Gaze behavior of 44 individuals with depressive symptoms and 49 individuals with no depressive symptoms was analyzed in a free viewing task. Grouping was based on the Beck Depression Inventory using the cut-off proposed by Hautzinger et al. (2006). Participants saw pairs of faces with direct gaze showing emotional or neutral expressions. One-half of the face pairs was shown without face masks, whereas the other half was presented with face masks. Participants’ dwell times and first fixation durations were analyzed. Results In case of unmasked facial expressions, participants with depressive symptoms looked shorter at the eyes compared to individuals without symptoms across all expression conditions. No group difference in first fixation duration on the eyes of masked and unmasked faces was observed. Individuals with depressive symptoms dwelled longer on the mouth region of unmasked faces. For masked faces, no significant group differences in dwell time on the eyes were found. Moreover, when specifically examining dwell time on the eyes of faces with an emotional expression there were also no significant differences between groups. Overall, participants gazed significantly longer at the eyes in masked compared to unmasked faces. Conclusions For faces without mask, our results suggest that depressiveness in healthy individuals goes along with less visual attention to other persons’ eyes but not with less visual attention to others’ faces. When factors come into play that generally amplify the attention directed to the eyes such as face masks or emotions then no relationship between depressiveness and visual attention to the eyes can be established.
... Newborns are sensitive to the play of light that affects the faces they observe already between 13 and 168 hours of life (Farroni et al., 2005). Already at about 36 hours of age (but probably even earlier) they prefer faces with open eyes rather than closed ones (Batki et al., 2000). Between 24 and 120 hours of life they have a clear preference for social visual stimuli (Salva et al., 2011). ...
Chapter
With our eyes we usually transmit two types of information: information concerning our mental states (emotions, intentions, etc ...) and information on our attentional focus. The eyes of human beings, compared to those of other animals, appear more expressive due to some characteristics that are specific of humans, effectively described in 2001 by Kobayashi and Kohshima. The two authors, after comparing the morphological conformation of the eye of almost half of the known species of primates, found some unique characteristics compared to the rest of the animal world: (1) humans have a white sclera, this makes clearly visible the difference between the iris (which obviously includes the pupil) and sclera; (2) the sclera is exceptionally large in humans in proportion to the overall size of the eye and finally (3) the human sclera is exceptionally developed horizontally.
... Eye tracking measures eye movements and the distribution of gaze patterns in response to processing visual information (Mastergeorge et al., 2021). Face processing involves directing visual attention to human face and observing eye movements displayed on a human face (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000;Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002). This skill begins to develop from birth (Bedford et al., 2012). ...
Article
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Visual attention impairments of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been investigated in many studies over the past two decades. The purpose of this study was to examine the visual attention of children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children in different social interaction contexts. Videos and 3D animations with three different levels of social interaction content (low, medium, and high) were created for the current study. The participants included 21 children with ASD (𝑋̅ = 7.6, SD = 1.7) and 22 TD children (𝑋̅ = 8.5, SD = 1.0), all aged between 5 and 12 years. The participants observed the video and 3D animation presentations on a computer screen as a passive viewing task. While the children watched the social interaction scenarios, eye-tracking data was collected to analyze their total fixation duration. The findings indicated that both children with ASD and TD children exhibited the longest total fixation duration on the Eyes and Mouth regions, particularly during the Chocolate Bread scenario, which featured low-level social interaction. When we examined visual attention during the presentation of videos and 3D animations, we found that both groups of children displayed significantly more fixation duration on the face region, especially the Eyes region during the 3D animation presentation compared to the video presentation. The research findings were discussed, and recommendations for future studies were provided.
... A child carried by a caregiver in the lateral position has good visual access to two highly salient objects -the caregiver's face and hand,both of which are highly relevant in the context of social learning. Infants have a preference for faces (Farroni et al., 2005) and eyes (Batki et al., 2000). Both are prioritised in attention soon after birth. ...
Article
Full-text available
Infant carrying provides an important context for cognitive development and social learning in the first year of life. It enables children to perceive the world from a perspective similar to that of their parents. Lateral carrying provides children with new experiences because it gives them access to a broader range of objects. It also gives them better access to socially significant stimuli and aspects of the environment that are relevant to their parents. Thus, it can significantly contribute to learning about objects and their affordances as well as agents, their actions, and mental states. The paper argues that lateral carrying not only contributes to the development of skills related to the emergence of shared intentionality but may also play an important role in the development of the understanding of the we-mode and perhaps also in the formation of associations in the mirror neuron system. The final sections of the article offer suggestions for further research.
... Early in infancy orienting to social stimuli occurs and is generally understood to be necessary for later joint attention, which has been correlated with language development (e.g., Dawson et al., 1998;Dawson et al., 2004;Toth et al., 2006). Studies indicate that newborn babies recognize their mothers' voices (e.g., DeCasper & Fifer 1980) and show preference for looking at faces (e.g., Batki et al., 2000;Turati et al., 2002). This orientation to social stimuli seems to be disrupted in individuals with ASD. ...
Article
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Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who are also minimally verbal may require specialized interventions to promote the development of vocalizations. Preliminary research supports an innovative procedure called response contingent stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) as a potentially effective procedure to promote vocalizations. The primary aim of this study was to demonstrate the feasibility of delivering a randomized trial comparing response contingent SSP to a control condition. Secondary aims were to demonstrate the feasibility of deploying to the home environment the Digital Language Processor (DLP), a voice recorder by LENA®, and to examine preliminary efficacy of the intervention. Sixteen minimally verbal children with ASD (ages 2.0 to 3.9 years) were randomly assigned to the intervention or control condition with access to delayed treatment. Feasibility metrics were met in that 14 participants (88%) finished the study and attendance to all assessment time points and treatment sessions was over 90%. The research team conducted treatment sessions with 99% fidelity and collected 83.3% of voice recorder data. Nine of 16 caregiver satisfaction surveys were returned, and scores averaged 5.68 out of a possible 6.00 across all participants. Preliminary treatment data results showed that 8/14 participants (57%) showed significant improvement in target sounds and participants receiving the intervention were 3.5 times as likely to improve compared to control.
... Human infants are already as new-borns sensitive to others' gaze directions (Batki et al. 2000;Farroni et al. 2002) and spontaneously start co-orienting with gazes between 3 and 6 months (e.g., Butterworth and Jarrett 1991;Perra and Gattis 2010). The early ontogeny of gaze following in humans illustrates the fundamental character of this sociocognitive skill that subsequently has implications for the development of other cognitive capacities. ...
Article
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Gaze following refers to the ability to co-orient with others’ gaze directions. Ontogenetic studies on gaze following in animals have predominantly used human experimenters as demonstrators. It is, however, likely that developing animals are initially more attuned to individuals from their own species, which might result in differences in the ontogenetic onset of gaze following with human and conspecific demonstrators. “Checking back” is a signature behaviour in the gaze following repertoires of humans, apes, and some Old world monkeys. It is commonly interpreted as a representation of the referentiality of gaze and is thus diagnostic of social predictions. Recently, “checking back” has been discovered in four avian species, suggesting a shared skill among birds. To investigate effects of con- and allospecific demonstrators on gaze following responses, we studied visual co-orientations of four hand-raised juvenile common ravens (Corvus corax) with human and conspecific gaze cues. Moreover, we for the first time investigated “checking back” in ravens and compared the effects of con- and allospecific demonstrators on this behaviour. Ravens followed human and conspecific gaze with no apparent differences in ontogenetic onset, but after significantly longer latencies with human demonstrators. Subjects moreover already checked back at 30 days old and did so significantly more often with conspecific demonstrators. Our findings suggest differences in processing speed and social predictions of human and conspecific gazes, indicating an underlying neurocognitive mechanism attuned to social information gathering from conspecifics. We propose more studies using conspecific demonstrators to reveal the full gaze following potential of a species.
... Gaze following is a fast and quasi reflex-like behaviour that emerges very early during ontogeny (Batki et al., 2000;Del Bianco et al., 2019;Driver et al., 1999;Friesen & Kingstone, 1998;Hood et al., 1998;Langton et al., 2000;Szufnarowska et al., 2014), hence meeting Fodor's criteria of a domain specific, probably largely innate capacity (Fodor, 1983). Although gaze following is an automatic behaviour in some contexts, triggering a reflexive saccade in the observer (Feng & Zhang, 2014), observers are able to control it if alternative behaviours might be more pertinent in a given moment. ...
Article
Gaze following is a major element of non-verbal communication and important for successful social interactions. Human gaze following is a fast and almost reflex-like behavior, yet, it can be volitionally controlled and suppressed to some extent if inappropriate or unnecessary, given the social context. In order to identify the neural basis of the cognitive control of gaze following, we carried out an event-related fMRI experiment, in which human subjects' eye movements were tracked while they were exposed to gaze cues in two distinct contexts: a baseline gaze following condition in which subjects were instructed to use gaze cues to shift their attention to a gazed-at spatial target and a control condition in which the subjects were required to ignore the gaze cue and instead to shift their attention to a distinct spatial target to be selected based on a color mapping rule, requiring the suppression of gaze following. We could identify a suppression-related BOLD response in a frontoparietal network comprising dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the anterior insula, precuneus and posterior parietal cortex (PPC). These findings suggest that over excitation of frontoparietal circuits in turn suppressing the gaze following patch might be a potential cause of gaze following deficits in clinical populations.
... Children have no prenatal experience of perceiving faces, but they show a preference for faces from birth (e.g., Valenza, Simion, Cassia, & Umilta, 1996). Even more, newborns prefer faces that look directly at them to faces that avert their gaze (Farroni, Massaccesi, Pividori, & Johnson, 2004), and they prefer faces with eyes open to faces with eyes closed (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000). This face preference suggests that children distinguish from birth between a social agent and a non-social physical object and respond to whether the face-bearing social agent wants to interact with them and whether to expect something interesting to learn from this person. ...
... Direct gaze has been shown to be an effective cue for directing attention in adults and infants, and several studies have highlighted the importance of gaze as a social cue for understanding the human mind and behavior (Baron-Cohen, 1995;Batki et al., 2000;Senju & Csibra, 2008). In this context, several studies have tested the importance of gaze in infants with schematic faces or photographs, and have provided evidence that newborns prefer direct gaze to averted gaze (Farroni et al., 2002(Farroni et al., , 2004. ...
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For a long time, newborns were considered as human beings devoid of perceptual abilities who had to learn with effort everything about their physical and social environment. Extensive empirical evidence gathered in the last decades has systematically invalidated this notion. Despite the relatively immature state of their sensory modalities, newborns have perceptions that are acquired, and are triggered by, their contact with the environment. More recently, the study of the fetal origins of the sensory modes has revealed that in utero all the senses prepare to operate, except for the vision mode, which is only functional starting from the first minutes after birth. This discrepancy between the maturation of the different senses leads to the question of how human newborns come to understand our multimodal and complex environment. More precisely, how the visual mode interacts with the tactile and auditory modes from birth. After having defined the tools that newborns use to interact with other sensory modalities, we review studies across different fields of research such as the intermodal transfer between touch and vision, auditory-visual speech perception, and the existence of links between the dimensions of space, time, and number. Overall, evidence from these studies supports the idea that human newborns are spontaneously driven, and cognitively equipped, to link information collected by the different sensory modes in order to create a representation of a stable world.
... Children have no prenatal experience of perceiving faces, but they show a preference for faces from birth (e.g., Valenza, Simion, Cassia, & Umilta, 1996). Even more, newborns prefer faces that look directly at them to faces that avert their gaze (Farroni, Massaccesi, Pividori, & Johnson, 2004), and they prefer faces with eyes open to faces with eyes closed (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000). This face preference suggests that children distinguish from birth between a social agent and a non-social physical object and respond to whether the face-bearing social agent wants to interact with them and whether to expect something interesting to learn from this person. ...
... Eye contact is one of the most powerful methods of communication between humans and this starts within days. Babies prefer faces with eyes open(582) and prefer faces that engage with them in mutual directed gaze rather than an averted gaze(583). New-borns learn to imitate the gestures of other, even engaging in 'contagious' crying within just a few days of birth(581,584). ...
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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a common neurodevelopmental condition typically diagnosed at 2-4 years of age when deficits in social interaction and communication are noted by carers. Our knowledge of ASD is advancing with greater awareness of the needs of autistic children and adults and a move towards improving services for these patients. The underlying neurobiology of ASD is a unifying aetiological agent, likely altered through both genetic and environmental influences. There is compelling evidence to suggest that abnormalities in Excitatory (E) glutamate and inhibitory (I) Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid (GABA) signalling in the brain may underpin ‘atypical’ development. Therefore I chose to examine relationships within the glutamatergic system in the striatum. First I looked at metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5) in adults with and without ASD and found higher levels of mGluR5 among autistic participants. This is consistent with other recent studies. Despite the close functional ties between mGluR5 and E/I signalling, no-one had directly examined the relationship between mGluR5 and glutamate or GABA in vivo in the human brain of autistic individuals. I found a strong negative relationship between GABA+ and mGluR5. I then looked at mGluR5 in three animal models associated with ASD to see whether any of these models might explain the greater availability of mGluR5 in autism. CNTNAP2 KO mice had significantly higher mGlu5 receptor binding in the striatum (caudate-putamen) as compared to wild-type (WT) mice. Given that CNTNAP2 is associated with a specific striatal deficit of parvalbumin positive GABA interneurons and ‘autistic’ features, this finding suggests that an increase in mGluR5 in ASD may relate to developmental GABAergic interneuron abnormalities. Neurodevelopment requires careful coordination of neuronal and glial processes spanning proliferation, differentiation, myelination and pruning. Disruption to this process can result in neurodevelopmental difficulties and disorders such as ASD. Therefore I conducted early life studies examining the relationship between subcortical Glx (Glutamate and Glutamine), N-acetylaspartate (a marker of neuronal health) and myo-Inositol (a marker of glial activity) at three early life time points: in utero, within 4 weeks of birth (neonatal time point) and at 4-6-months of age (‘infant’ time point). I compared these to later neurodevelopmental outcomes finding that higher neonatal NAA concentrations corresponded to better general neurodevelopmental scores and lower ADOS-2 scores. As NAA is a marker of neuronal health this implies that we can mark neuronal health at birth and demonstrate that this correlates with neurodevelopmental outcomes. I then went on to examine these same relationships at the 4-6-month timepoint. Higher levels of myo-Inositol (and therefore greater glial activity) corresponded to poorer general and social developmental outcomes. Higher levels of Glx and therefore excess excitation predicted greater social deficits. This is in keeping with the theory of E/I imbalance.
... Studies investigating the subtleties of infants' attention to faces have suggested that infants' attention to the eyes and the mouth shifts across development. At birth, eyes determine newborns' preferential orientation toward faces (Acerra et al., 2002;Batki et al., 2000). Infants show great sensitivity to eyes and gaze direction, essential cues in conveying social information and establishing a communicative connection with another individual. ...
Article
To prevent the spread of COVID‐19, face masks were mandatory in many public spaces around the world. Since faces are the gateway to early social cognition, this raised major concerns about the effect face masks may have on infants' attention to faces as well as on their language and social development. The goal of the present study was to assess how face masks modulate infants' attention to faces over the course of the first year of life. We measured 3, 6, 9, and 12‐month‐olds’ looking behavior using a paired visual preference paradigm under two experimental conditions. First, we tested infants' preference for upright masked or unmasked faces of the same female individual. We found that regardless of age, infants looked equally long at the masked and unmasked faces. Second, we compared infants' attention to an upright masked versus an inverted masked face. Three‐ and 6‐month‐olds looked equally long to the masked faces when they were upright or inverted. However, 9‐ and 12‐month‐old infants showed a novelty preference for the inverted masked face. Our findings suggest that more experience with faces, including masked faces, leads to efficient adaptations of infants' visual system for processing impoverished social stimuli, such as partially occluded faces.
... Attending to another individual's focus of attention has shown to be of great importance for the development of social communication. From a very early age, infants manifest a special sensitivity to other people's faces, first by showing preferential interest for the eyes (see Batki et al., 2000;Farroni et al., 2002;Maurer, 1985), and soon later by actually following their interlocutor's gaze (i.e., D'Entremont et al., 1997;Gredebäck et al., 2010;Hains and Muir, 1996;Hood et al., 1998). From an evolutionary point of view, the importance of eye-gaze detection has led (across evolutionary pressure) humans to sacrifice camouflage for communication, developing a higher eye contrast morphology with respect to non-human primate eyes (Kobayashi and Kohshima, 1997). ...
Article
Gaze acts from an early age as a cue to orient attention and, thereafter, to infer our social partners' intentions, thoughts, and emotions. Variants of the attentional orienting paradigm have been used to study the orienting capabilities associated to eye gaze. However, to date, it is still unclear whether this methodology truly assesses “social-specific” processes exclusively involved in attention to eye-gaze or the operation of domain-general attentional processes. The present study provides a comprehensive meta-analysis indicating that eye-gaze and non-social directional stimuli, such as arrows, produce equivalent attentional effects. This result casts doubt on the potential utility of the classic cueing task in revealing social-specific processes. On the other hand, we review behavioral evidence suggesting that eye-gaze stimuli may induce higher-order social processes when more specific experimental procedures that analyze qualitative rather than quantitative differences are used. These findings point to an integrated view in which domain-general and social specific processes both contribute to the attentional mechanisms induced by eye-gaze direction. Finally, some proposals about the social components specifically triggered by eye-gaze stimuli are discussed.
... It was later shown that already newborns are sensitive to others' gazes (Batki et al., 2000;Farroni et al., 2002) and have a preference for direct gaze (Farroni et al., 2002). Gaze cueing, where observers orient towards an object in the direction of another's gaze, also appears to be present in newborns (Farroni et al., 2004). ...
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Social gaze has received much attention in social cognition research in both human and non-human animals. Gaze following appears to be a central skill for acquiring social information, such as the location of food and predators, but can also draw attention to important social interactions, which in turn promotes the evolution of more complex socio-cognitive processes such as theory of mind and social learning. In the past decades, a large number of studies has been conducted in this field introducing differing methodologies. Thereby, various factors influencing the results of gaze following experiments have been identified. This review provides an overview of the advances in the study of gaze following, but also highlights some limitations within the research area. The majority of gaze following studies on animals have focused on primates and canids, which limits evolutionary interpretations to only a few and closely related evolutionary lineages. This review incorporates new insights gained from previously understudied taxa, such as fishes, reptiles, and birds, but it will also provide a brief outline of mammal studies. We propose that the foundations of gaze following emerged early in evolutionary history. Basic, reflexive co-orienting responses might have already evolved in fishes, which would explain the ubiquity of gaze following seen in the amniotes. More complex skills, such as geometrical gaze following and the ability to form social predictions based on gaze, seem to have evolved separately at least two times and appear to be correlated with growing complexity in brain anatomy such as increased numbers of brain neurons. However, more studies on different taxa in key phylogenetic positions are needed to better understand the evolutionary history of this fundamental socio-cognitive skill.
... Infants' social learning is supported by several early emerging behavioral patterns, such as a sensitivity and responsivity to social and communicative cues, social contingency, and behavioral mimicking, all of which lay the foundation for social learning mechanisms to develop. Sensitivity to social stimuli, such as faces (Guellai and Streri, 2011), gaze direction (Batki et al., 2000) and biological motion (Simion et al., 2011) emerges within the first year. Newborns, for instance, not only show a preference for face-like stimuli (Rosa Salva et al., 2011;Simion et al., 2011), but also exhibit greater recognition, as indexed through longer gaze time, for faces that have previously spoken to them with direct eye gaze compared to averted faces (Guellai and Streri, 2011). ...
Chapter
The foundations of learning are laid in infancy. Using examples from pioneer and recent studies, we describe three mechanisms essential to infants' knowledge acquisition: associative, statistical, and social learning. We argue that a comprehensive understanding of infants' learning is limited by the traditional focus on mechanisms in isolation. We showcase two integrative approaches that begin to clarify how distinct mechanisms work together to provide a comprehensive, parsimonious, description of infants' learning. We raise considerations for moving toward a complete, culturally nuanced, modern understanding of how infants across the globe acquire the knowledge foundations for optimal development.
... In the same way, newborns look longer at upright biological motion displays which could bootstrap processing of social cues (Bardi et al., 2011;Simion et al., 2002Simion et al., , 2008. Previous works hypothesized these results reflect the presence of innate modules or inborn hardwired neural systems as part of an evolutionarily ancient system selected to pay attention to such pattern (Bardi et al., 2011;Baron-Cohen, 1997;Baron-Cohen, 1997;Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000;Simion et al., 2008). In addition to these wirings, we hypothesize that evolution could have also selected for a specific amount of cognitive resources available from birth that would match the complexity of the most relevant patterns found in a newborn's environment, making them closer to the infant's optimal level of stimulation. ...
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Phenomena such as engagement, attention and curiosity rely heavily on the “optimal-level of stimulation (or arousal)” model, which suggests they are driven by stimuli being neither too simple nor too complex. Two points often overlooked in psychology are that each stimulus is simultaneously processed with its context, and that a stimulus complexity is relative to an individual’s cognitive resources to process it. According to the “optimal-level of stimulation” model, while familiar contexts may decrease the overall stimulation and favour exploration of novelty, a novel context may increase the overall stimulation and favour preference for familiarity. In order to stay closer to their optimum when stimulation is getting too high or too low, individuals can explore other stimuli, adopt a different processing style or be creative. The need and the ability to adopt such strategies will depend upon the cognitive resources available, which can be affected by contextual stimulation and by other factors such as age, mood or arousability. Drawing on empirical research in cognitive and developmental psychology, we provide here an updated “optimal-level of stimulation” model, which is holistic and coherent with previous literature. Once taken into account the role of contextual stimulation as well as the diverse factors influencing internal cognitive resources, such model fits with and enriches other existing theories related to exploratory behaviors. By doing so, it provides a useful framework to investigate proximate explanations underlying learning and cognitive development, and to develop future interventions related, for example, to eating, and learning disorders.
... En effet, dès 2 mois, les nourrissons préfèrent regarder les yeux que les autres régions du visage (Hainline, 1978 ;Haith et al., 1977). D'autres travaux ont montré que les nouveau-nés préfèrent un visage dans lequel les yeux sont dirigés vers le bébé plutôt que détournés du bébé (Farroni et al., 2002) et un visage dans lequel les yeux sont ouverts plutôt que fermés (Batki et al., 2000). En grandissant, cette préférence semble de plus spécifique aux yeux humains, puisque des visages de singes présentés avec des yeux d'humains plutôt que les leurs sont préférés par les nourrissons dès 3 mois (Dupierrix et al., 2014). ...
Thesis
Dès la naissance, les nourrissons sont exposés à des visages qui parlent. Afin de pouvoir correctement interagir avec leurs congénères, les nouveau-nés vont devoir apprendre à traiter l’information provenant de ceux-ci. Le traitement des visages et le traitement du langage se développent ainsi rapidement durant la première année de vie des nourrissons. Cependant, que ce soit pour les visages ou pour le langage, beaucoup de nourrissons ont un biais d’exposition : ils sont presque exclusivement exposés aux visages de leur type et à leur langue maternelle. Une conséquence de ce biais d’exposition est que les nourrissons vont développer des capacités de discrimination plus fines pour traiter les stimuli natifs que les stimuli non-natifs. Dans la littérature scientifique, ce phénomène appelé rétrécissement perceptif à été mis en évidence de nombreuses fois dans le cadre du développement du langage et dans le cadre du développement du traitement des visages. La trajectoire développementale commune de ces deux systèmes cognitifs durant la première année de vie suggère des interactions entre ces deux systèmes. Cependant, ces interactions sont encore peu étudiées.Le but de la thèse présentée ici était d’étudier les interactions entre les traitements du langage et des visages durant la première année de vie.Dans une première étude, nous avons voulu étudier l’impact du type de visage sur une tâche de correspondance phonémique, sur des nourrissons de 3 et 9 mois. Les nourrissons de 3 mois ne semblent pas faire correspondre une voyelle avec la vidéo d’une locutrice si celle-ci n’est pas d’un type familier. Les résultats de cette étude nous indiquent que dès 3 mois, les nourrissons traitent différemment le signal audio-visuel selon le type du visage qui le produit. Dans une deuxième étude, nous avons voulu évaluer l’impact du type de visage sur la perception de l’effet McGurk, sur des nourrissons de 6, 9 et 12 mois. De plus, nous avons souhaité voir la robustesse de cet effet en l’étudiant de manière interculturelle (en France et au Japon). Nous montrons que la sensibilité à cette illusion audio-visuelle semble dépendante du type de visage. De plus, mis en commun avec nos collègues japonais, nos résultats montrent que la sensibilité à l’effet McGurk peut être conditionné par la culture dans laquelle grandissent les nourrissons. Dans une troisième étude, nous nous sommes intéressés à l’impact des associations entre types de visages et types de langues sur l’attention visuelle des nourrissons de 6, 9 et 12 mois. Cette étude montre qu’à 3 mois, certaines associations de langues et de visages semblent attendus par les nourrissons et plus regardées. Ces associations sont considérées comme congruentes puisqu’elles ne vont pas à l’encontre de ce que les nourrissons rencontrent habituellement dans leur environnement. Dans une quatrième étude, nous avons testé l’impact de ces associations sur la reconnaissance d’individus par des nourrissons de 9 et 12 mois. Nous montrons que les associations congruentes aident la reconnaissance des individus, tandis que les associations incongruentes perturbent la reconnaissance des individus.Ces études renforcent l’idée que d’étroites interactions lient le traitement du langage et le traitement des visages durant la petite enfance. De plus, nous montrons de nouveaux marqueurs du rétrécissement perceptif avant 9 mois. Nous montrons aussi un nouveau moyen expérimental permettant de moduler l’impact du rétrécissement perceptif. Ces travaux de thèse permettent d’élargir nos connaissances concernant le rétrécissement perceptif et ainsi d’en affiner la définition.
... Humans are born with a preference of looking at the eyes. Newborns spend a significantly longer time looking at a face with opened eyes than the same face with closed eyes [1]. The preference to look at faces with opened eyes continues to be higher than the preference to look at faces with closed eyes as the child matures [2]. ...
Article
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Our eyes convey information about a person. The pupils may provide information regarding our emotional states when presented along with different emotional expressions. We examined the effects of pupil size and vergence on inferring other people’s characteristics in neutral expression eyes. Pupil sizes were manipulated by overlaying black disks onto the pupils of the original eye images. The disk area was then changed to create small, medium, and large pupils. Vergence was simulated by shifting the medium-sized disks nasally in one eye. Pupil sizes were exaggerated for Experiment 1 and followed values from the literature for Experiment 2. The first Purkinje image from the eye photos in Experiment 2 was kept to preserve image realism. The characteristics measured were sex, age, attractiveness, trustworthiness, intelligence, valence, and arousal. Participants completed one of two online experiments and rated eight eye pictures with differently sized pupils and with vergence eyes. Both experiments were identical except for the stimuli designs. Results from Experiment 1 revealed rating differences between pupil sizes for all characteristics except sex, age, and arousal. Specifically, eyes with extremely small pupil sizes and artificial vergence received the lowest ratings compared to medium and large pupil sizes. Results from Experiment 2 only indicated weak effects of pupil size and vergence, particularly for intelligence ratings. We conclude that the pupils can influence how characteristics of another person are perceived and may be regarded as important social signals in subconscious social interaction processes. However, the effects may be rather small for neutral expressions.
... Shortly after birth (if not even before, see Reid et al., 2017), infants show a preference for face-like stimuli over non-face-like stimulus configurations (Valenza et al., 1996), which might be explained by certain characteristics of face-like configurations (Cassia et al., 2004;Morton & Johnson, 1991;Turati et al., 2002). From early on, infants are sensitive to faces that seem ready for communication: For example, newborns look longer to faces that look directly at them than to faces that look away (Farroni et al., 2002) and they prefer faces with open eyes compared to closed eyes (Batki et al., 2000). Further, infants are faster to detect peripheral stimuli that appear in the direction of an artificial gaze shift (a phenomenon termed gaze cueing), which might hint at a rudimentary sensitiv-sufficient to provide infants with the social input they need to develop social and emotional competencies such as gaze following. ...
Article
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The COVID‐19 pandemic has been influencing people's social life substantially. Everybody, including infants and children needed to adapt to changes in social interactions (e.g., social distancing) and to seeing other people wearing facial masks. In this study, we investigated whether these pandemic‐related changes influenced 12‐ to 15‐months‐old infants' reactions to observed gaze shifts (i.e., their gaze following). In two eye‐tracking tasks, we measured infants' gaze‐following behavior during the pandemic (with‐COVID‐19‐experience sample) and compared it to data of infants tested before the pandemic (no‐COVID‐19‐experience sample). Overall, the results indicated no significant differences between the two samples. However, in one sub‐task infants in the with‐COVID‐19‐experience sample looked longer at the eyes of a model compared to the no‐COVID‐19‐experience sample. Within the with‐COVID‐19‐experience sample, the amount of mask exposure and the number of contacts without mask were not related to infants' gaze‐following behavior. We speculate that even though infants encounter fewer different people during the pandemic and are increasingly exposed to people wearing facial masks, they still also see non‐covered faces. These contacts might be sufficient to provide infants with the social input they need to develop social and emotional competencies such as gaze following.
... Our gaze, a key protagonist of social interactions, allows us to acquire information from the environment and simultaneously signal back toward it (Jarick & Kingstone, 2015). Regarding this second property, the gaze can be considered a stimulus in itself, with a unique morphology that we are prepared to recognize from an early age (Batki et al., 2000). The human sclera (white area surrounding the darker iris) is significantly more exposed compared with other species', reflecting how our gaze has evolved sacrificing adaptation to camouflage from predators to gain increased gaze signal (Kobayashi & Kohshima, 1997). ...
Article
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Subtle to no attentional differences have been broadly observed when using gaze and arrows as orienting cues. However, recent studies have found opposite effects when they are used as targets in spatial interference tasks, with arrows eliciting faster responses when their position is congruent with the indicated direction and gaze producing faster responses in incongruent conditions. In two preregistered experiments aimed at exploring the mechanisms supporting these findings, we examined whether the congruency sequence effects (CSE) elicited by gaze and arrows generalized from one stimulus to another, using an intrablock design where the type of stimuli was manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis. Typical CSE were observed for arrows, with a decrease of congruency effects after incongruent trials, and reversed CSE for gaze, with an increased inversion of congruency effects after incongruent trials. Both patterns occurred independently of the preceding type of target, showing that congruency effects can decrease after positive outcomes (e.g., arrow trials following an incongruent gaze trial), and generalized across different nonsocial and social stimuli as shown in a third experiment. These results are consistent with the coexistence of a shared spatial interference component between gaze and arrow trials, potentially responsible for the CSE obtained in switching target trials, and an additional social dimension, exclusively engaged in gaze trials. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... He suggested that Fodorian modules, such as an eye direction detector, process specific categories of sensory input. Support of this notion is found in research indicating that newborns prefer looking at faces with open eyes (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000) and at faces displaying direct over averted gaze (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002;Farroni, Massaccesi, Pividori, & Johnson, 2004). Other theories are more process-oriented. ...
Chapter
Though much is known about the emergence and development of gaze following in infancy, there are large disagreements in some critical areas and major uncertainties within others. In this work, we highlight some of these areas in terms of five big questions that we believe are essential to address in order to advance research in the field. (1) How does social environment and culture impact gaze following? (2) What mechanisms drive the emergence of gaze following? (3) Does gaze following facilitate language development? (4) Is diminished gaze following an early marker of Autism? (5) How does gaze following relate to perspective-taking? This chapter aims not to answer these questions but to stimulate a discussion about the fundamental principles and assumptions on which the field resides and potentially serve as a guide for future research programs.
... Attending to another individual's focus of attention has shown to be of great importance for the development of social communication. From a very early age, infants manifest a special sensitivity to other people's faces, first by showing preferential interest for the eyes (see Maurer, 1985;Batki et al., 2000;Farroni et al., 2002), and soon later by actually following their interlocutor's gaze (i.e., Hains & Muir, 1996;Hood et al., 1998;D'Entremont et al., 1997;Gredebäck et al., 2010). From an evolutionary point of view, the benefits of making gaze and gaze direction easily identifiable must be so important as to have led (across evolutionary pressure) the human sclera to produce a significantly higher contrast with the darker central iris, even if that implies sacrificing camouflage and therefore increasing the cost of exposition to predators (Kobayashi & Kohshima, 1997). ...
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Gaze acts from an early age as a cue to orient attention and, thereafter, to infer our social partners' intentions, thoughts, and emotions. Variants of the attentional orienting paradigm have been used to study the orienting capabilities associated to eye gaze. However, to date, it is still unclear whether this methodology truly assesses an attribute of social cognition in this stimulus. The present study provides a comprehensive meta-analysis showing that nonsocial directional stimuli, such as arrows, produce an effect identical to that of eye gaze, indicating that orienting triggered by this social cue may be reflecting a domain-general orienting rather than a specialized mechanism of social cognition. Nonetheless, biologically relevant stimuli may induce additional higher-order processes of a social nature, which might only be observed with more specific experimental procedures that analyse qualitative rather than quantitative differences. Data from those paradigms support the existence of common and specific attentional mechanisms triggered by gaze. Finally, we offer some conclusions about the nature of extra-social cognition processes specifically triggered by eye gaze.
... One possible explanation of the inversion effects observed is that domain-specific mechanisms for gaze following are tuned to upright faces and bodies, and are no-longer engaged-or engaged less-by inverted exemplars. According to one domainspecific account, humans possess innate neurocognitive mechanisms for gaze following [10][11][12] . It is likely that following the gaze of others helps to scaffold the development of more complex mentalizing skills (e.g., visual perspective taking, understanding of others' beliefs and desires), thought to aid social learning, interaction and collaboration 13 . ...
Article
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It is well-established that faces and bodies cue observers’ visuospatial attention; for example, target items are found faster when their location is cued by the directionality of a task-irrelevant face or body. Previous results suggest that these cueing effects are greatly reduced when the orientation of the task-irrelevant stimulus is inverted. It remains unclear, however, whether sensitivity to orientation is a unique hallmark of “social” attention cueing or a more general phenomenon. In the present study, we sought to determine whether the cueing effects produced by common objects (power drills, desk lamps, desk fans, cameras, bicycles, and cars) are also attenuated by inversion. When cueing stimuli were shown upright, all six object classes produced highly significant cueing effects. When shown upside-down, however, the results were mixed. Some of the cueing effects (e.g., those induced by bicycles and cameras) behaved liked faces and bodies: they were greatly reduced by orientation inversion. However, other cueing effects (e.g., those induced by cars and power drills) were insensitive to orientation: upright and inverted exemplars produced significant cueing effects of comparable strength. We speculate that (i) cueing effects depend on the rapid identification of stimulus directionality, and (ii) some cueing effects are sensitive to orientation because upright exemplars of those categories afford faster processing of directionality, than inverted exemplars. Contrary to the view that attenuation-by-inversion is a unique hallmark of social attention, our findings indicate that some non-social cueing effects also exhibit sensitivity to orientation.
... It is indeed known that eye gaze has a crucial role in detecting the focus of attention of other individuals and in inferring their goals [27][28][29]. From a developmental point of view, the attraction of the eye area appears spontaneously in two month-old children, and its absence is associated with severe pathologies [30]. For instance, individuals who show difficulties looking into the eyes of others might have clinical conditions such as schizophrenia [31], autism [32] or focal brain damage [33]. ...
Article
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Humans beings decide to trust others selectively, often based on the appearance of a face. But how do observers deal with the wide variety of facial morphologies and, in particular, those outside their own familiar cultural group? Using reverse correlation, a data-driven approach to explore how individuals create internal representations without external biases, we studied the generation of trustworthy faces by French and Chinese participants (N = 160) within and outside their own cultural group. Participants selected the most trustworthy or attractive (control condition) face from two identical European or Asian descent faces that had been modified by different noise masks. A conjunction analysis to reveal facial features common to both cultures showed that Chinese and French participants unconsciously increased the contrast of the "pupil-iris area" to make the face appear more trustworthy. No significant effects common to both groups were found for the attraction condition suggesting that attraction judgements are dependent on cultural processes. These results suggest the presence of universal cross-cultural mechanisms for the construction of implicit first impressions of trust, and highlight the importance of the eyes area in this process.
... Reduced eye gaze as a potential endophenotype to clinical ASD has received great interest over many decades (Itier & Batty, 2009;Klin et al., 2020;Phillips et al., 1992;Schultz, 2005;Tiede & Walton, 2020). Human babies have an innate preference for faces (Goren et al., 1975;Valenza et al., 1996) and the eye region in particular draws their attention (Batki et al., 2000). Relative to typically developing children, however, infants later diagnosed with ASD look less at faces and show reduced eye contact and gaze-following behaviour (Leekam et al., 1998;Merin et al., 2007;Riby et al., 2009). ...
Article
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Reduced eye contact early in life may play a role in the developmental pathways that culminate in a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. However, there are contradictory theories regarding the neural mechanisms involved. According to the amygdala theory of autism, reduced eye contact results from a hypoactive amygdala that fails to flag eyes as salient. However, the eye avoidance hypothesis proposes the opposite—that amygdala hyperactivity causes eye avoidance. This review evaluated studies that measured the relationship between eye gaze and activity in the ‘social brain’ when viewing facial stimuli. Of the reviewed studies, eight of eleven supported the eye avoidance hypothesis. These results suggest eye avoidance may be used to reduce amygdala-related hyperarousal among people on the autism spectrum.
... L'attention conjointe est une compétence Dans nos communications quotidiennes, l'engagement entre partenaires sociaux se fait par un regard dirigé vers le regard de l'interlocuteur. De même, les bébés ont une préférence pour des visages présentés de face, une préférence pour les regards directs (les yeux regardent en face, comme lors d'un regard mutuel) et non pas pour des regards détournés (les yeux seraient alors orientés à droite ou à gauche) (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000 ;Farroni, Menon, & Johnson, 2006). Par ailleurs, les enfants de 4 semaines passent un temps impressionnant à regarder les yeux d'un étranger, ce qui fait de cette partie du visage un lieu privilégié d'échange d'informations entre deux partenaires (Blass & Camp, 2004). ...
Article
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Faire face à l’annonce de la surdité d’un bébé n’est pas une chose aisée, surtout si l’on est parent entendant d’enfant sourd. Cet article est une revue de question sur les tout premiers échanges avec les bébés sourds afin de développer au mieux l’attention conjointe, cette capacité à partager un même objet d’intérêt, à coordonner les regards puis les actions. L’attention conjointe est une compétence sociale de communication qui est prédictive du langage. Quelle place pend-elle chez l’enfant sourd ? Nous détaillerons les quatre difficultés que le bébé sourd va rencontrer pour développer cette compétence d’attention conjointe et nous évoquerons les stratégies qu’il met en place pour contourner ces difficultés. Au final, l’appareillage précoce couplé à l’introduction d’une langue codée ou signée apparaît comme un point fort pour aider l’enfant sourd de parents entendants à développer ses compétences de communication, et pour offrir au parent entendant plus de plaisir à échanger avec son enfant sourd.
... For example, the famous "top-heavy" configuration has been shown to attract the attention of newborns, meaning that newborns prefer certain facial geometric patterns (Simion et al., 2002). Furthermore, Batki et al. (2000) showed that newborns spend more time looking at faces with open eyes than at faces with closed eyes. This showed that eyes, when combined with the geometric face pattern, serves as an important cue to grab the infants' attention. ...
Article
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Pupil contagion is the phenomenon in which an observer’s pupil-diameter changes in response to another person’s pupil. Even chimpanzees and infants in early development stages show pupil contagion. This study investigated whether dynamic changes in pupil diameter would induce changes in infants’ pupil diameter. We also investigated pupil contagion in the context of different faces. We measured the pupil-diameter of 50 five- to six-month-old infants in response to changes in the pupil diameter (dilating/constricting) of upright and inverted faces. The results showed that (1) in the upright presentation condition, dilating the pupil diameter induced a change in the infants’ pupil diameter while constricting the pupil diameter did not induce a change, and (2) pupil contagion occurred only in the upright face presentation, and not in the inverted face presentation. These results indicate the face-inversion effect in infants’ pupil contagion.
Article
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, both the public and researchers have raised questions regarding the potential impact of protective face-mask wearing on infants’ development. Nevertheless, limited research has tested infants’ response to protective face-mask wearing adults in real-life interactions and in neurodiverse populations. In addition, scarce attention was given to changes in interactive behavior of adults wearing a protective face-mask. The aims of the current study were (1) to examine differences in 12-month-old infants’ behavioral response to an interactive parent wearing a protective face-mask during face-to-face interaction, (2) to investigate potential differences in infants at higher likelihood for autism (HL-ASD) as compared with general population (GP) counterparts, and (3) to explore significant differences in parents’ behaviors while wearing or not wearing a protective face-mask. A total of 50 mother–infant dyads, consisting of 20 HL-ASD infants (siblings of individuals with autism) and 30 GP infants, participated in a 6-min face-to-face interaction. The interaction was videotaped through teleconferencing and comprised three 2-min episodes: (a) no mask, (b) mask, and (c) post-mask. Infants’ emotionality and gaze direction, as well as mothers’ vocal production and touching behaviors, were coded micro-analytically. Globally, GP infants exhibited more positive emotionality compared with their HL-ASD counterparts. Infants’ negative emotionality and gaze avoidance did not differ statistically across episodes. Both groups of infants displayed a significant increase in looking time toward the caregiver during the mask episode. No statistically significant differences emerged in mothers’ behaviors. These findings suggest that the use of protective face-masks might not negatively affect core dimensions of caregiver–infant interactions in GP and HL-ASD 12-month-old infants.
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The effects of social (eye gaze, pointing gestures) and symbolic (arrows) cues on observers’ attention are often studied by presenting such cues in isolation and at fixation. Here, we extend this work by embedding cues in natural scenes. Participants were presented with a single cue (Experiment 1) or a combination of cues (Experiment 2) embedded in natural scenes and were asked to ‘simply look at the images’ while their eye movements were recorded to assess the effects of the cues on (overt) attention. Single-gaze and pointing cues were fixated for longer than arrows but at the cost of shorter dwell times on the cued object. When presented together, gaze and pointing cues were fixated faster and for longer than simultaneously presented arrows. Attention to the cued object depended on the combination of cues and whether both cues were directed towards or away from the target object. Together, the findings confirm earlier observations that people attract attention more strongly than arrows but that arrows more strongly direct attention.
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Among a variety of entities in their environment, what do humans consider alive or animate and how does this attribution of animacy promote development of more abstract levels of mentalizing? By decontextualizing the environment of bodily features, we review how physical movements give rise to perceived animacy in Heider-Simmel style animations. We discuss the developmental course of how perceived animacy shapes our interpretation of the social world, and specifically discuss when and how children transition from perceiving actions as goal-directed to attributing behaviors to unobservable mental states. This transition from a teleological stance, asserting a goal-oriented interpretation to an agent's actions, to a mentalistic stance allows older children to reason about more complex actions guided by hidden beliefs. The acquisition of these more complex cognitive behaviors happens developmentally at the same time neural systems for social cognition are coming online in young children. We review perceptual, developmental, and neural evidence to identify the joint cognitive and neural changes associated with when children begin to mentalize and how this ability is instantiated in the brain.
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The purpose of this study was to explore how young children’s vocal and facial cues contribute to conveying to adults important information about children’s attributes when presented together. In particular, the study aimed to disentangle whether children’s vocal or facial cues, if either, are more dominant when both types of cues are displayed in a contradictory mode. To do this, we assigned 127 college students to one of three between-participants conditions. In the Voices-Only condition, participants listened to four pairs of synthetized voices simulating the voices of 4-5-year-old and 9-10-year-old children verbalizing a neutral-content sentence. Participants needed to indicate which voice was better associated with a series of 14 attributes organized into four trait dimensions (Positive Affect, Negative Affect, Intelligence, and Helpless), potentially meaningful in young child–adult interactions. In the Consistent condition, the same four pairs of voices delivered in the Voices-Only condition were presented jointly with morphed photographs of children’s faces of equivalent age. In the Inconsistent condition, the four pairs of voices and faces were paired in a contradictory manner (immature voices with mature faces vs. mature voices with immature faces). Results revealed that vocal cues were more effective than facial cues in conveying young children’s attributes to adults and that women were more efficient (i.e., faster) than men in responding to children’s cues. These results confirm and extend previous evidence on the relevance of children’s vocal cues to signaling important information about children’s attributes and needs during their first 6 years of life.
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A figyelem az életünk meghatározó része, a legapróbb cselekedeteinket is átszövi kora gyermekkortól egészen az időskorig. Mindenki tud példát mondani arra, amikor figyelt, amikor valamire direkt nem figyelt, amikor észrevett valami változást, amit mások nem, amikor elfáradt és nem tudott tovább figyelni, és arra is, amikor felfrissült és újra oda tudott figyelni. Persze ebben nagyok az egyéni különbségek, hiszen arra, hogy mire, mennyire és hogyan figyelünk, hat az, hogy milyen természetűek vagyunk. Az viszont mindenkire igaz, hogy figyelem nélkül sok szórakoztató tevékenységet nem tudnánk gyakorolni. A figyelmi képességünk alapvető, elválaszthatatlan része a kommunikációnak, a digitális eszközhasználatnak, a sportnak és a művészetnek. Ugyanakkor a figyelmi képességeink alapvetőségének akkor kerülünk igazán tudatába, amikor valamelyik „része” hiányzik. A figyelmi deficitek széles körben megjelennek a neuropszichológiától a különböző függőségeken át a figyelemhiányos hiperaktivitás-zavarig. Jelen kötet célja közérthetően bemutatni a figyelem (kognitív) pszichológiájának sokszínűségét és egyes aspektusainak gyakorlati relevanciáját olyan alkalmazott szemlélettel, amely érthető az érdeklődő laikusoknak és hasznára lehet számos diszciplínában tanuló (jövőbeli) szakembernek.
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Previous studies found an onset of holistic face processing in the age range between 0–4 and 7 months of age. To validate these studies, the present study investigated infants 4 and 7 months of age with a different experimental approach. In a habituation‐dishabituation experiment, the infants were tested with stereoscopic stimuli in which stripes floated above a face, thereby occluding some parts of the face (amodal completion condition), and stereoscopic stimuli in which the same face parts floated above stripes (modal completion condition). Research with adults indicates that faces are processed holistically, that is as global wholes, in the amodal, but as independent parts in the modal completion condition, resulting in superior face recognition when the occluding bars are in front of than when they are behind the visible face parts. The present study found that infants regardless of whether they are 4 or 7 months old reliably recognized and differentiated the faces in the amodal but not in the modal completion condition. Moreover, the difference between the experimental conditions was statistically significant. These findings show that approximately at the age of 4–7 months of life, infants begin to holistically unify disjoint face parts into a coherent whole.
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El artículo estudia el valor profundo de la mirada al otro al comienzo de la vida desde la psicología, en el crecimiento de la vida desde algunos autores de la filosofía y algunos rasgos de la sociología y en el final de la vida desde el acompañamiento a la persona en un caso real. En este final de la vida podemos observar cinco momentos en la evolución de la mirada, algunos de los cuales son la otra cara de la mirada al comienzo de la vida.
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It has been proposed that humans automatically compute the visual perspective of others. Evidence for this view comes from the Dot Perspective Task. In this task, participants view a room in which a human actor is depicted, looking either leftwards or rightwards. Dots can appear on either the left wall of the room, the right wall, or both. At the start of each trial, participants are shown a number. Their speeded task is to decide whether the number of dots visible matches the number shown. On consistent trials the participant and the actor can see the same number of dots. On inconsistent trials, the participant and the actor can see a different number of dots. Participants respond faster on consistent trials than on inconsistent trials. This self-consistency effect is cited as evidence that participants compute the visual perspective of others automatically, even when it impedes their task performance. According to a rival interpretation, however, this effect is a product of attention cueing: slower responding on inconsistent trials simply reflects the fact that participants' attention is directed away from some or all of the to-be-counted dots. The present study sought to test these rival accounts. We find that desk fans, a class of inanimate object known to cue attention, also produce the self-consistency effect. Moreover, people who are more susceptible to the effect induced by fans tend to be more susceptible to the effect induced by human actors. These findings suggest that the self-consistency effect is a product of attention cueing.
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L’attention conjointe est le fait de partager ensemble un intérêt commun pour un objet. Avec l’étude princeps de Scaife et Bruner en 1975, elle est envisagée comme le premier pas vers la cognition sociale. Depuis la naissance, avec la détection du regard jusqu’à la compréhension de l’intentionnalité d’autrui à la fin de la période pré verbale, cet article propose une revue de littérature sur les paradigmes expérimentaux et les modèles qui ont été élaborés pour en rendre compte.
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Faces, as a class of objects, have been studied extensively in order to understand how the human visual system recognizes and represents objects. In this paper we studied the ontogeny of the ability to perceive gaze direction. We bring together both developmental research and neurophysiological and neuropsychological research in order to address this issue. In two experiments we explored the developmental time course of the ability to discriminate between direct and averted gaze, a task thought to involve cortical information processing of faces. We found that (a) infants as young as four months could discriminate between direct and averted gaze, (b) this ability was not due to the development of low-level visual processes, and (c) younger infants did not show reliable evidence of gaze discrimination. In an additional experiment we tested adults to study the effect of face context on the ability to discriminate gaze direction. Adult subjects were more sensitive in this discrimination when the eyes were in the context of an upright face than when the eyes were in either an inverted face or in a scrambled face. Taken together, these results suggest that the mechanisms underlying gaze detection may be mediated by cortical circuits also involved in other aspects of face recognition.
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The face communicates an impressive amount of visual information. We use it to identify its owner, how they are feeling and to help us understand what they are saying. Models of face processing have considered how we extract such meaning from the face but have ignored another important signal – eye gaze. In this article we begin by reviewing evidence from recent neurophysiological studies that suggests that the eyes constitute a special stimulus in at least two senses. First, the structure of the eyes is such that it provides us with a particularly powerful signal to the direction of another person’s gaze, and second, we may have evolved neural mechanisms devoted to gaze processing. As a result, gaze direction is analysed rapidly and automatically, and is able to trigger reflexive shifts of an observer’s visual attention. However, understanding where another individual is directing their attention involves more than simply analysing their gaze direction. We go on to describe research with adult participants, children and non-human primates that suggests that other cues such as head orientation and pointing gestures make significant contributions to the computation of another’s direction of attention.
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his paper seeks to bring together two previously separate research traditions: research on spatial orienting within the visual cueing paradigm and research into social cognition, addressing our tendency to attend in the direction that another person looks. Cueing methodologies from mainstream attention research were adapted to test the automaticity of orienting in the direction of seen gaze. Three studies manipulated the direction of gaze in a computerized face, which appeared centrally in a frontal view during a peripheral letter-discrimination task. Experiments 1 and 2 found faster discrimination of peripheral target letters on the side the computerized face gazed towards, even though the seen gaze did not predict target side, and despite participants being asked to ignore the face. This suggests reflexive covert and/or overt orienting in the direction of seen gaze, arising even when the observer has no motivation to orient in this way. Experiment 3 found faster letter discrimination on the side the computerized face gazed towards even when participants knew that target letters were four times as likely on the opposite side. This suggests that orienting can arise in the direction of seen gaze even when counter to intentions. The experiments illustrate that methods from mainstream attention research can be usefully applied to social cognition, and that studies of spatial attention may profit from considering its social function.
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Cortical neurons that are selectively sensitive to faces, parts of faces and particular facial expressions are concentrated in the banks and floor of the superior temporal sulcus in macaque monkeys. Their existence has prompted suggestions that it is damage to such a region in the human brain that leads to prosopagnosia: the inability to recognize faces or to discriminate between faces. This was tested by removing the face-cell area in a group of monkeys. The animals learned to discriminate between pictures of faces or inanimate objects, to select the odd face from a group, to inspect a face then select the matching face from a pair of faces after a variable delay, to discriminate between novel and familiar faces, and to identify specific faces. Removing the face-cell area produced no or little impairment which in the latter case was not specific for faces. In contrast, several prosopagnosic patients were impaired at several of these tasks. The animals were less able than before to discern the angle of regard in pictures of faces, suggesting that this area of the brain may be concerned with the perception of facial expression and bearing, which are important social signals in primates.
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Cells selectively responsive to the face have been found in several visual sub-areas of temporal cortex in the macaque brain. These include the lateral and ventral surfaces of inferior temporal cortex and the upper bank, lower bank and fundus of the superior temporal sulcus (STS). Cells in the different regions may contribute in different ways to the processing of the facial image. Within the upper bank of the STS different populations of cells are selective for different views of the face and head. These cells occur in functionally discrete patches (3-5 mm across) within the STS cortex. Studies of output connections from the STS also reveal a modular anatomical organization of repeating 3-5 mm patches connected to the parietal cortex, an area thought to be involved in spatial awareness and in the control of attention. The properties of some cells suggest a role in the discrimination of heads from other objects, and in the recognition of familiar individuals. The selectivity for view suggests that the neural operations underlying face or head recognition rely on parallel analyses of different characteristic views of the head, the outputs of these view-specific analyses being subsequently combined to support view-independent (object-centred) recognition. An alternative functional interpretation of the sensitivity to head view is that the cells enable an analysis of 'social attention', i.e. they signal where other individuals are directing their attention. A cell maximally responsive to the left profile thus provides a signal that the attention (of another individual) is directed to the observer's left. Such information is useful for analysing social interactions between other individuals.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
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Goren, Sarty, and Wu (1975) claimed that newborn infants will follow a slowly moving schematic face stimulus with their head and eyes further than they will follow scrambled faces or blank stimuli. Despite the far-reaching theoretical importance of this finding, it has remained controversial and been largely ignored. In Experiment 1 we replicate the basic findings of the study. In Experiment 2 we attempt a second replication in a different maternity hospital, and extend the original findings with evidence suggesting that both the particular configuration of features, and some aspects of the features themselves, are important for preferential tracking in the first hour of life. In Experiment 3 we use a different technique to trace the preferential tracking of faces over the first five months of life. The preferential tracking of faces declines during the second month. The possible causes and consequences of this observation are discussed.
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Evidence from newborns leads to the conclusion that infants are born with some information about the structure of faces. This structural information, termed CONSPEC, guides the preference for facelike patterns found in newborn infants. CONSPEC is contrasted with a device termed CONLERN, which is responsible for learning about the visual characteristics of conspecifics. In the human infant, CONLERN does not influence looking behavior until 2 months of age. The distinction between these 2 independent mechanisms allows a reconciliation of the conflicting data on the development of face recognition in human infants. Finally, evidence from another species, the domestic chick, for which a similar 2-process theory has already been put forward, is discussed. The new nomenclature is applied to the chick and used as a basis for comparison with the infant.
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The direction of eye gaze and orientation of the face towards or away from another are important social signals for man and for macaque monkey. We have studied the effects of these signals in a region of the macaque temporal cortex where cells have been found to be responsive to the sight of faces. Of cells selectively responsive to the sight of the face or head but not to other objects (182 cells) 63% were sensitive to the orientation of the head. Different views of the head (full face, profile, back or top of the head, face rotated by 45 degrees up to the ceiling or down to the floor) maximally activated different classes of cell. All classes of cell, however, remained active as the preferred view was rotated isomorphically or was changed in size or distance. Isomorphic rotation by 90-180 degrees increased cell response latencies by 10-60 ms. Sensitivity to gaze direction was found for 64% of the cells tested that were tuned to head orientation. Eighteen cells most responsive to the full face preferred eye contact, while 18 cells tuned to the profile face preferred averted gaze. Sensitivity to gaze was thus compatible with, but could be independent of, sensitivity to head orientation. Results suggest that the recognition of one type of object may proceed via the independent high level analysis of several restricted views of the object (viewer-centred descriptions).
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Research on gaze and eye contact was organized within the framework of Patterson's (1982) sequential functional model of nonverbal exchange. Studies were reviewed showing how gaze functions to (a) provide information, (b) regulate interaction, (c) express intimacy, (d) exercise social control, and (e) facilitate service and task goals. Research was also summarized that describes personal, experiential, relational, and situational antecedents of gaze and reactions to gaze. Directions were given for a functional analysis of the relation between gaze and physiological responses. Attribution theories were integrated into the sequential model for making predictions about people's perceptions of their own gazing behavior and the gazing behavior of others. Data on people's accuracy in reporting their own and others' gaze were presented and integrated with related findings in attribution research. The sequential model was used to analyze research studies measuring the interaction between gaze and personal and contextual variables. Methodological and measurement issues were discussed and directions were outlined for future research.
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Bartlett viewed thinking as a high level skill exhibiting ballistic properties that he called its “point of no return”. This paper explores one aspect of cognition through the use of a simple model task in which human subjects are asked to commit attention to a position in visual space other than fixation. This instruction is executed by orienting a covert (attentional) mechanism that seems sufficiently time locked to external events that its trajectory can be traced across the visual field in terms of momentary changes in the efficiency of detecting stimuli. A comparison of results obtained with alert monkeys, brain injured and normal human subjects shows the relationship of this covert system to saccadic eye movements and to various brain systems controlling perception and motion. In accordance with Bartlett's insight, the possibility is explored that similar principles apply to orienting of attention toward sensory input and orienting to the semantic structures used in thinking.
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Four experiments are reported that were aimed at elucidating some of the controversial issues concerning the preference for facelike patterns in newborns. The experiments were devised to contrast the original and the revised versions of the sensory hypothesis and the structural hypothesis as accounts of face preference in newborns. Experiments 1A and 1B supported the structural hypothesis by showing a visual preference for the stimulus for which components were located in the correct arrangement for a human face. Experiment 2 supported the sensory hypothesis by showing a visual preference for stimuli that were designed to have the optimal spatial frequency components for the newborn visual system. Experiment 3 showed that babies directed attention to a facelike pattern also when it was presented simultaneously with a nonfacelike stimulus with optimal spatial frequency for the newborn visual system.
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We sought to determine whether regions of extrastriate visual cortex could be activated in subjects viewing eye and mouth movements that occurred within a stationary face. Eleven subjects participated in three to five functional magnetic resonance imaging sessions in which they viewed moving eyes, moving mouths, or movements of check patterns that occurred in the same spatial location as the eyes or mouth. In each task, the stimuli were superimposed on a radial background pattern that continually moved inward to control for the effect of movement per se. Activation evoked by the radial background was assessed in a separate control task. Moving eyes and mouths activated a bilateral region centered in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS). The moving check patterns did not appreciably activate the STS or surrounding regions. The activation by moving eyes and mouths was distinct from that elicited by the moving radial background, which primarily activated the posterior-temporal-occipital fossa and the lateral occipital sulcus-a region corresponding to area MT/V5. Area MT/V5 was also strongly activated by moving eyes and to a lesser extent by other moving stimuli. These results suggest that a superior temporal region centered in the STS is preferentially involved in the perception of gaze direction and mouth movements. This region of the STS may be functionally related to nearby superior temporal regions thought to be involved in lip-reading and in the perception of hand and body movement.
Article
The long-latency electrical response of the brain stem evoked by stimulation of the cortex of freely moving monkeys is modified by a change of attention. The modification may be either suppression or augmentation, according to the background activity prior to the shift of attention.
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Evidence from preference studies suggests that infants can discriminate face and non-face patterns and usually prefer to look longer at face-like patterns. This face preference is present at birth. Recognition memory studies demonstrate that the learning curve for face and non-face patterns differ. On the basis of this and other evidence, some have suggested that faces represent an ecologically privileged class of stimuli and that there is a qualitative difference between the recognition and identification of face and non-face patterns. Others note that the recognition of faces requires many generalized abilities and suggest it is not qualitatively different from the perception of non-face patterns. For example, the very young infant’s preference for face-like patterns is reduced when face and non-face patterns are equated for visibility (based on amplitude spectra). Most neonates treat faces as abstract patterns and base their preferences for patterns on visibility. Categorization of abstracts and faces uses the same mechanism and processes. Increased experience with faces leads to different categorizations for faces than for abstracts, based on different cues.
Article
Four experiments investigate the hypothesis that cues to the direction of another's social attention produce a reflexive orienting of an observer's visual attention. Participants were asked to make a simple detection response to a target letter which could appear at one of four locations on a visual display. Before the presentation of the target, one of these possible locations was cued by the orientation of a digitized head stimulus, which appeared at fixation in the centre of the display. Uninformative and to-be-ignored cueing stimuli produced faster target detection latencies at cued relative to uncued locations, but only when the cues appeared 100 msec before the onset of the target (Experiments 1 and 2). The effect was uninfluenced by the introduction of a to-be-attended and relatively informative cue (Experiment 3), but was disrupted by the inversion of the head cues (Experiment 4). It is argued that these findings are consistent with the operation of a reflexive, stimulus-driven or exogenous orienting mechanism which can be engaged by social attention signals.
Article
Morton, Johnson, and Maurer (1990) have proposed a template-matching model to explain infants' preferences among facelike and abstract patterns as reported in a previous article (Kleiner, 1987). Problems with template models are noted. A model which relies primarily on the linear systems model and secondarily on pattern structure is discussed.
Article
recent evidence indicates that the cerebral cortex is extremely sensitive to experiential factors early in life / some of the extrinsic and intrinsic factors that constrain this plasticity are briefly reviewed / focus on the developmental consequence of one particular intrinsic constraint, cortical parcellation, on infants' ability to detect the direction of eye gaze in face stimuli / preliminary data from study of four-mo-old infants using a preferential looking paradigm are presented / results are discussed in terms of findings from single cell recordings in the macaque and from studies with adult prosopagnosic patients (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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The significance of eye contact for infants was investigated in 80 4–6 mo old children, half male and half female, from Guatemala. After 8 min of isolation, each S was seated facing the mother or a female stranger; this person looked into the S's eyes for 1 min and then slightly above the S's head for 1 min, or vice versa. The S's fixation on the face of the other person, smiling, vocalization, and crying were recorded by an observer. Few sex differences were found among the Ss; males smiled more often in the presence of the mother. Ss looked more at the stranger than at the mothers, especially when the stranger first looked at the Ss' eyes. When the mothers first looked in the Ss' eyes, Ss had less interest when they looked away. Results show that eye contact per se is relevant to 5-mo-old infants, and that they can distinguish between their mothers and female strangers and exhibit different behavior in the presence of each. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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In Mindblindness, Simon Baron-Cohen presents a model of the evolution and development of "mindreading." He argues that we mindread all the time, effortlessly, automatically, and mostly unconsciously. It is the natural way in which we interpret, predict, and participate in social behavior and communication. We ascribe mental states to people: states such as thoughts, desires, knowledge, and intentions. Building on many years of research, Baron-Cohen concludes that children with autism, suffer from "mindblindness" as a result of a selective impairment in mindreading. For these children, the world is essentially devoid of mental things. Baron-Cohen develops a theory that draws on data from comparative psychology, from developmental, and from neuropsychology. He argues that specific neurocognitive mechanisms have evolved that allow us to mindread, to make sense of actions, to interpret gazes as meaningful, and to decode "the language of the eyes." Bradford Books imprint
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Normal subjects were presented with a simple line drawing of a face looking left, right, or straight ahead. A target letter F or T then appeared to the left or the right of the face. All subjects participated in target detection, localization, and identification response conditions. Although subjects were told that the line drawing’s gaze direction (the cue) did not predict where the target would occur, response time in all three conditions was reliably faster when gaze was toward versus away from the target. This study provides evidence for covert, reflexive orienting to peripheral locations in response to uninformative gaze shifts presented at fixation. The implications for theories of social attention and visual orienting are discussed, and the brain mechanisms that may underlie this phenomenon are considered.
Article
An experimental situation was designed to investigate the differential effects of eye contact and unreciprocated gaze upon GSR activity. Twenty male and twenty female subjects gazed continuously at the eyes of a confederate, who either returned the gaze or looked at a spot on a wall 30° to the right of the subject's head, according to a prearranged program. The subjects' GSR was monitored throughout the period.Both frequency (p < .02) and amplitude (p < .001) of GSR responses were greater when subjects' gazes were reciprocated, (eye contact), than when unreciprocated. There were no main effects of sex.
Article
This study examined whether the linear systems model of infants' visual preferences (Banks & Salapatek, 1981) could predict neonates' preferences, among facelike and abstract patterns. To do so, the study assessed the relative importance of stimulus energy (as measured by the amplitude spectrum) and stimulus structure (as measured by the phase spectrum) in determining early preferences. Forty-eight neonates viewed six pairings of four stimuli: (a) a schematic face, (b) a lattice, (c) a pattern composed of the amplitude spectrum of the lattice and the phase spectrum of the face, and (d) a pattern composed of the amplitude spectrum of the face and the phase spectrum of the lattice. The linear systems model predicted the observed preferences quite accurately. That is, the infants' preferences could be predicted from knowledge of the amplitude spectrum but not the phase spectrum. These results are interpreted as showing that neonates' preferences for facelike patterns are governed primarily by simulus energy and not by the familiarity or social significance of such patterns.
Article
Mutual gaze may be described as a psychological process during which two persons have the feeling of a brief link between their two minds. In the monkey, specific cell assemblies in the superior temporal cortex of the brain are responsive to gaze. This suggests that the brain may have evolved mechanisms for interpreting direct eye contact. These mechanisms could depend on the activation of specific brain regions. Positron emission tomography was used to measure activity in brain regions in healthy volunteers while they were looking at faces featuring, respectively, eye contact, averted gaze, or no gaze. As expected a region known to be involved in face processing was found to be activated in the ventral occipito-temporal region, especially in the right hemisphere. Averted gaze and mutual gaze triggered blood flow responses in similar areas which were different from those involved in face processing. These areas included the occipital part of the fusiform gyrus, the right parietal lobule, the right inferior temporal gyrus, and the middle temporal gyrus in both hemispheres. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that perception of eyes regardless of the direction of the gaze is subserved by a distributed network. However, no conclusive evidence was found for specific area(s) devoted to mutual gaze processing.
Article
Two experiments examined whether infants shift their visual attention in the direction toward which an adult's eyes turn. A computerized modification of previous joint-attention paradigms revealed that infants as young as 3 months attend in the same direction as the eyes of a digitized adult face. This attention shift was indicated by the latency and direction of their orienting to peripheral probes presented after the face was extinguished. A second experiment found a similar influence of direction of perceived gaze, but also that less peripheral orienting occurred if the central face remained visible during presentation of the probe. This may explain why attention shifts triggered by gaze perception have been difficult to observe in infants using previous naturalistic procedures. Our new method reveals both that direction of perceived gaze can be discriminated by young infants and that this perception triggers corresponding shifts of their own attention.
Article
The eye movements of infants, aged 4–5, 7–8, and 10–11 weeks, were recorded while they viewed either a representation of a face or a nonface stimulus. Presentation of the visual stimulus was paired with the presentation of an auditory stimulus (either voice or tone) or silence. Attention to the visual stimulus was greater for the older two groups than for the youngest group. The effect of the addition of sound was to increase attention to the visual stimulus. In general, the face was looked at more than the nonface stimulus. The difference in visual attention between the face and the nonface stimulus did not appear to be based solely on the physical characteristics of the stimuli. A sharp increase in the amount of looking at the eyes of the face stimulus at 7–8 weeks of age seemed to be related to a developing appreciation of the meaning of the face as a pattern.
Article
Visual fixations of 3- to 5-week-old, 7-week-old, and 9- to 11-week-old infants were recorded as they scanned an adult's face which was stationary, moving, or talking. A dramatic increase in face fixations occurred between 5 and 7 weeks for all conditions. Talking produced an intensification of scanning in the eye area in the two older groups.
Article
Forty newborn infants, median age 9 minutes, turned their eyes and heads to follow a series of moving stimuli. Responsiveness was significantly greater to a proper face pattern than to either of two scrambled versions of the same stimulus or to a blank. The demonstration of such consistent response differences suggests that visual discriminations are being made at this early age. These results imply that organized visual perception ion is an unlearned capacity of the human organism. The preference for the proper face stimulus by infants who had not seen a real face prior to testing suggests that an unlearned or "evolved" responsiveness to faces may be present in human neonates.
Article
Accuracy at perceiving frontal eye gaze was studied in monkeys and human subjects using a forced-choice detection task on paired photographs of a single human face. Monkeys learned the task readily, but after bilateral removal of the banks and floor of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) they failed to perform the task efficiently. This result is consistent with the conclusion, based on recordings from single cells in awake, behaving monkeys [Perret et al., Physiological Aspects of Clinical Neuro-ophthalmology, Chapman & Hall, London, 1988] that this region of the temporal lobe is important for coding information about eye-gaze of a confronting animal. Human subjects were given identical stimuli in a task where they were asked to detect "the face that is looking straight at you". Human performance is sensitive to the degree of angular deviation from the frontal gaze position, being poorest at small angular deviations from 0 degrees. This was also true of monkeys viewing these stimuli, pre- and post-operatively. Compared with normal controls, two humans prosopagnosics were impaired at this task. However the extent of impairment was different in the two patients. These findings are related to earlier reports (including those for patients with right-hemisphere damage without prosopagnosia), to normal performance with upright and inverted face photographs, and to notions of independent subsystems in face processing.
Article
Current approaches to the study of infant pattern vision have yielded interesting findings but have not yielded a set of data or principles from which general predictions can be drawn. We propose an alternative approach based on measurements of the contrast sensitivity function (CSF). This approach has been successfully applied to the study of adult vision. In principle, the approach allows one to predict the detectability of a wide variety of two-dimensional patterns if one knows the observer's CSF. Two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, CSFs of 1-, 2-, and 3-month infants were measured using a fixation preference paradigm. The results indicated noteworthy development between 1 and 3 months particularly in sensitivity to high spatial frequencies (fine stripes). The low-frequency attenuation characteristic of adult vision is observed at 2 and 3 months but not always at 1. In Experiment 2, CSFs of 2-month infants were measured at a lower luminance level. The results indicated that low-frequency attenuation became less pronounced as would be predicted if it were a manifestation of lateral inhibitory processing. The manner in which the CSF can be used to make general predictions is described. The CSFs of Experiment 1 are then used to successfully predict infants' detection of patterns used in two frequently cited experiments. We also propose a simple model of infant pattern preference and show that the model accurately predicts the results of a number of well-known experiments.
Article
The frequency of lethal mutations occurring in Drosophila melanogaster was reduced by approximately one-half when irradiated males were treated with actinomycin D, which also inhibited the appearance of melanotic atypical growths in the strain used for the study.
Article
Human infants under 5 days of age consistently looked more at black-and-white patterns than at plain colored surfaces, which indicates the innate ability to perceive form.
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The state variable in neonatal research
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