Role of Social Gaze on Visual Search in an Eye-Tracking Paradigm

Gaze cueing refers to the natural inclination to direct one’s gaze in the direction of another’s gaze. This can be used in visual search tasks to facilitate or interfere with the search. Here, we examined the interaction between 3 gaze cue conditions (congruent, incongruent, and neutral) and a search task using letter arrays. Congruent cues had a gaze cue looking at the target, incongruent cues had a gaze cue looking away from the target, and neutral cues had a gaze cue looking straight ahead. An eye tracker was used to measure search task completion times (CTs). For all conditions, participants fixated on a target stimulus in the middle of the screen to begin the trial. The target disappeared. Then the gaze cue appeared, followed by the search array. Participants then had to locate the target. We expected CTs to be shortest for congruent cues and longest for incongruent cues, with neutral cues somewhere in the middle. Trials were randomized between our 3 conditions. A 1-way ANOVA found a significant impact of gaze cueing on this search task, F(2) = 10.15, p < .001, ηp2 = .28. Pairwise comparisons found significant differences between congruent and incongruent conditions, p < .001, and between neutral and congruent conditions, p = .006. Together, these results supported our hypothesis; congruent gaze cueing facilitated visual search whereas incongruent gaze and neutral gaze failed to assist visual search. These findings provide a firmer understanding of the interactions between gaze cueing and visual search paradigms.