Srijita Karmakar¹ (), Ana Dai Liu¹, Miguel P. Eckstein¹; ¹University of California, Santa Barbara

Introduction: The perception of someone’s gaze direction is influenced by the gazer’s eye and head orientation, face eccentricity, and the presence and location of gaze goals (Han & Eckstein, 2023; Loomis et al, 2008; Todorović, 2009). However, in the real world, humans infer others’ gaze in the context of their impending actions. The extent to which gaze judgments and eye movements are influenced by scene context remains poorly understood. Methods: Here, we develop a new image stimulus type that preserves head and eye gaze information while introducing an object that alters the implied gazer’s intended actions (Gaze Winograd Images, GWI). Specifically, we manipulated the presence of an object in the gazer's hand that was contextually related to one of the other objects in the vicinity of the gazed-at object. We collected perceptual judgements and eye-movement data across an online behavioral study (N = 180) and an eye‑tracking study (N = 20) for 52 GWIs (26 pairs), where observers reported which object the gazer was looking at. We hypothesized that the presence of an object in the gazer’s hand would bias observers towards the related object and away from the gazed-at object. Results: In the “object-in-hand-present” condition, the non-gazed contextually-related object was perceived as the gazed object (p<.001) as well as fixated more frequently (p<.001) than the gazed-at object. The mean proportion of fixations (per trial per subject) on the contextually-related object (M=0.17, SD=0.033) was significantly higher than on the gazed-at object (M=0.11, SD=0.023) (p<0.001). In a control “object-in-hand-absent” condition, observers fixated more frequently on the gazed object and selected it as being gazed at (p<0.05). Conclusion: Together, our findings demonstrate that human judgements of gaze and related eye movements reflect an inferential process of integrating the gazer’s head direction with contextually relevant scene information related to the gazer’s future actions.