Srijita Karmakar

Presentation Title

Gaze-Following Saccades Dynamics During Search

Abstract

The ability to follow another person’s gaze quickly and precisely reflects important evolutionary mechanisms that underlie social interactions, such as attention modulation and prediction of future actions. Recent studies have shown that observers utilize gazer head direction and peripheral information to execute anticipatory saccades toward gaze goals. However, how anticipatory eye movements are influenced by the presence of multiple potential gaze goals, the absence of the gazer, and the relative distance between the gazer and gaze goal has not been studied.  In this work, we presented dynamic stimuli of gazers moving their heads to look at other individuals in the scene. Observers were instructed to search for a target individual while their eye movements were recorded. We extend previous findings to more general scenarios and provide an important control by including a "gazer absent" condition. Firstly, we find that the absence of a gazer induces a significantly larger saccade error in estimating the goal location but only when the initial fixation location and the gaze goal location are far from each other. We also find that the first saccade’s amplitude and onset latency are significantly higher in gazer-present than in gazer-absent trials. Secondly, the first saccade error in estimating the goal location was significantly larger when multiple potential (gaze) goals were present in the periphery compared to just one peripheral (gaze) goal. Further analyses revealed that in trials with more than one potential (gaze) goal, the observer’s first saccade tended to land at the individual closer to the initial fixation location. Finally, we find that observers have greater anticipation of the gazer’s head direction when multiple potential gaze goals are present in the periphery. Taken together, our findings extend the understanding of eye movement control in integrating foveal and peripheral information during gaze-following to complex and naturalistic scenarios.