Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: Effects of social status and speaking

Human visual attention operates in a context that is complex, social and dynamic. To explore this, we recorded people taking part in a group decision-making task and then showed video clips of these situations to new participants while tracking their eye movements. Observers spent the majority of ti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition 2010-12, Vol.117 (3), p.319-331
Main Authors: Foulsham, Tom, Cheng, Joey T., Tracy, Jessica L., Henrich, Joseph, Kingstone, Alan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activity levels. Psychomotricity
Attention
Attention - physiology
Biological and medical sciences
Decision Making
Decision Making - physiology
Dynamic scene perception
Eye Movements
Female
Fixation, Ocular - physiology
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Gaze
Group dynamics
Hierarchy, Social
Human Body
Humans
Interpersonal Relationship
Language
Male
Prediction
Production and perception of spoken language
Psychological effects
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Social attention
Social Environment
Social Status
Speech
Speech - physiology
Speech perception
Task Analysis
Verbal communication
Video Technology
Vigilance. Attention. Sleep
Visual Perception - physiology
Young Adult
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Summary:Human visual attention operates in a context that is complex, social and dynamic. To explore this, we recorded people taking part in a group decision-making task and then showed video clips of these situations to new participants while tracking their eye movements. Observers spent the majority of time looking at the people in the videos, and in particular at their eyes and faces. The social status of the people in the clips had been rated by their peers in the group task, and this status hierarchy strongly predicted where eye-tracker participants looked: high-status individuals were gazed at much more often, and for longer, than low-status individuals, even over short, 20-s videos. Fixation was temporally coupled to the person who was talking at any one time, but this did not account for the effect of social status on attention. These results are consistent with a gaze system that is attuned to the presence of other individuals, to their social status within a group, and to the information most useful for social interaction.
ISSN:0010-0277
1873-7838
DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.09.003