Carmela Gottesman¹, Meagan Zieman¹; ¹University of South Carolina Salkehathie

Research on the effects of gaze on spatial attention distribution typically use isolated faces or eyes without a background scene. Some previous research, using pictures of people in real-world scenes showed that the orientation of people in those scenes affects viewers’ attention distribution. However, the body orientation to the left of the right was sufficient to facilitate a search task in that direction. Head or gaze orientation didn’t make a difference unless the search target was in the line of sight. In this study, we examined if the same search would be affected by the face orientation if the body was not shown in the pictures. Disembodied heads were presented on the same real-world scenes used before. Heads of the same people were presented either facing forward or to the side- gazing to the right or to the left. Each head was presented on the same scene they were in the previous study, but they were enlarged to fill more of the picture space. Participants were tasked with finding a probe- small cross superimposed either on the right or on the left part of the scene. Participant were faster at detecting the probe when the head was oriented towards the relevant part of the scene than when it was oriented in the opposite direction. When the head was oriented forward there was no significant difference in search times to the right or the left and there was no overall difference in response time to forward versus sideways facing heads. Thus, we found that with the body absent, the head took on a more important attention directing role in a real-world scene, replicating results for gaze effects without scenes present. Taken together these studies reinforce the importance of body orientation, although head orientation can make a difference as well.