Affiliation:
1. School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia
Abstract
A person's focus of attention is conveyed by the direction of their eyes and face, providing a simple visual cue fundamental to social interaction. A growing body of research examines the visual mechanisms that encode the direction of another person's gaze as we observe them. Here we investigate the
spatial receptive field properties
of these mechanisms, by testing the spatial selectivity of sensory adaptation to gaze direction. Human observers were adapted to faces with averted gaze presented in one visual hemifield, then tested in their perception of gaze direction for faces presented in the same or opposite hemifield. Adaptation caused strong, repulsive perceptual aftereffects, but only for faces presented in the same hemifield as the adapter. This occurred even though adapting and test stimuli were in the same external location across saccades. Hence, there was clear evidence for
retinotopic
adaptation and a relative lack of either
spatiotopic
or
spatially invariant
adaptation. These results indicate that adaptable representations of gaze direction in the human visual system have retinotopic spatial receptive fields. This strategy of coding others' direction of gaze with positional specificity relative to one's own eye position may facilitate key functions of gaze perception, such as socially cued shifts in visual attention.
Funder
Australian Research Council
Subject
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Environmental Science,General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine
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1. Spatial selectivity in adaptation to gaze direction;Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences;2022-08-10