Eye contact boosts the reflexive component of overt gaze following

Abstract

Establishing eye contact with an individual can subsequently lead to a stronger gaze-mediated orienting effect. However, studies exploring this phenomenon have, so far, only assessed manual responses and focused on covert attention – namely, without eye movements. Here, in two experiments, we explored for the first time whether eye contact can also impact on overt attention in an oculomotor task. This approach has two main advantages, in that it relies on more sensitive, online measures of attention allocation and it better mimics real life settings. Participants performed leftwards and rightwards eye movements in response to a central cue. Furthermore, a task-irrelevant central face established – or not – eye contact with the participant, and then averted its gaze either leftwards or rightwards. Hence, eye movement direction was either congruent or incongruent with that of the gaze stimulus. In both experiments, a gaze following behaviour emerged – specifically, smaller saccadic latencies and a greater accuracy emerged on congruent than on incongruent trials – but its magnitude was not modulated by eye contact. However, in Experiment 2 – in which the different eye contact conditions were presented intermixed rather than blocked, thus making eye contact contextually salient – eye contact led to an overall decrement of saccadic latencies and enhanced the reflexive component of gaze following. Taken together, these results provide novel evidence indicating that eye contact can impact on both eye movements programming and overt gaze following mechanisms, at least when eye contact is made contextually salient.