Gaze cueing in naturalistic scenes under top-down modulation–Effects on gaze behaviour and memory performance

Abstract

Humans as social beings rely on information provided by conspecifics. One important signal in social communication is eye gaze. The current study (n = 93) sought to replicate and extend previous findings of attentional guidance by eye gaze in complex everyday scenes. In line with previous studies, longer, more and earlier fixations for objects cued by gaze compared to objects that were not cued were observed in free viewing conditions. To investigate how robust this prioritization is against top-down modulation, half of the participants received a memory task that required scanning the whole scene instead of exclusively focusing on cued objects. Interestingly, similar gaze cueing effects occurred in this group. Moreover, the human beings depicted in the scene received a large amount of attention, especially during early phases of visual attention, even though they were irrelevant to the current task. These results indicate that the mere presence of other human beings, as well as their gaze orientation, have a strong impact on attentional exploration. Data and analysis scripts are available at https://osf.io/jk9s4.