Maria Falikman¹ (), Rob Sullivan², Amelia Clark¹, Myers Bell¹, Sienna McFarland¹; ¹The University of The South, ²University of Virginia

Human gaze perception evolved to support social interaction and cooperation. Another person’s gaze direction is used to obtain information, and gaze contact is a straightforward way to engage in interaction. Yet, it is unclear how the two types of gaze exchange are processed by an observer. To address this question, we developed a novel peripheral gaze shift detection paradigm based on the gaze cueing paradigm. We presented three faces on the computer screen, one in the center of the screen and two—at 6 degrees to the right and to the left of it, and instructed participants to respond to a gaze shift of one of the peripheral faces while fixating the central face. The central face looked towards the left or right peripheral face. In 200 ms, the corresponding peripheral face looked either towards the central face (mutual gaze) or in the same direction as the central face (gaze following). Participants gave a 4-AFC manual response about the location and direction of a peripheral face’s gaze shift. Gaze following was detected significantly faster than mutual gaze, a result that may have evolutionary relevance, with the gaze acting as a spatial cue towards vital information. Post-experimental debriefing also revealed a lack of metacognitive access to the efficiency of gaze direction detection. The gaze following superiority effect was replicated in the second experiment, in which we manipulated the instruction by using two types of prompts: one emphasizing teamwork between the observer and the agents on the screen, and the other emphasizing individual competition. We hypothesized that prioritizing cooperation can facilitate mutual gaze processing. However, responses to gaze following were again significantly faster than to mutual gaze, and there was no interaction between gaze type and instruction, probably indicating the primacy of a shared focus of attention in both competition and cooperation.