autobiographical memory retrieval; eye movements; facial cues; gaze aversion; internal attention; social cues; Psychology (all); General Psychology
Abstract :
[en] Gaze direction is a powerful social cue that indicates the direction of attention and can be used to decode others' mental states. When an individual looks at an external object, inferring where their attention is focused from their gaze direction is easy. But when people are immersed in memories, their attention is oriented towards their inner world. Is there any specific gaze direction in this situation, and if so, which one? While trying to remember, a common behavior is gaze aversion, which has mostly been reported as an upward-directed gaze. Our primary aim was to evaluate whether gaze direction plays a role in the inference of the orientation of attention-i.e., external vs. internal-in particular, whether an upward direction is considered as an indicator of attention towards the internal world. Our secondary objective was to explore whether different gaze directions are consistently attributed to different types of internal mental states and, more specifically, memory states (autobiographical or semantic memory retrieval, or working memory). Gaze aversion is assumed to play a role in perceptual decoupling, which is supposed to support internal attention. We therefore also tested whether internal attention was associated with high gaze eccentricity because the mismatch between head and eye direction alters visual acuity. We conducted two large-sample (160-163 participants) online experiments. Participants were asked to choose which mental state-among different internal and external attentional states-they would attribute to faces with gazes oriented in different directions. Participants significantly associated internal attention with an upward-averted gaze across experiments, while external attention was mostly associated with a gaze remaining on the horizontal axis. This shows that gaze direction is robustly used by observers to infer others' mental states. Unexpectedly, internal attentional states were not more associated with gaze eccentricity at high (30°) than low (10°) eccentricity and we found that autobiographical memory retrieval, but not the other memory states, was highly associated with 10° downward gaze. This reveals the possible existence of different types of gaze aversion for different types of memories and opens new perspectives.
Disciplines :
Theoretical & cognitive psychology
Author, co-author :
Servais, Anaïs ; Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition (CerCo), CNRS-UPS, UMR5549, Toulouse, France ; Ecole Nationale d'Aviation Civile (ENAC), Toulouse, France
Hurter, Christophe; Ecole Nationale d'Aviation Civile (ENAC), Toulouse, France
Barbeau, Emmanuel J; Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition (CerCo), CNRS-UPS, UMR5549, Toulouse, France
Language :
English
Title :
Gaze direction as a facial cue of memory retrieval state.
Abeles D. Yuval-greenberg S. (2017). Just look away: gaze aversions as an overt attentional disengagement mechanism. Cognition 168, 99–109. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.06.021, PMID: 28666215
Admoni H. Scassellati B. (2017). Social eye gaze in human-robot interaction: a review. J. Human-Robot Interact. 6:25. doi: 10.5898/jhri.6.1.admoni
Alea N. Bluck S. (2003). Why are you telling me that? A conceptual model of the social function of autobiographical memory. Memory 11, 165–178. doi: 10.1080/741938207, PMID: 12820829
Andrist S. Tan X. Z. Gleicher M. Mutlu B. (2014). Conversational gaze aversion for humanlike robots. ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. Human-Robot Interact. 2014, 25–32. doi: 10.1145/2559636.2559666
Baron-cohen S. Cross P. (1992). Reading the eyes: evidence for the role of perception in the development of a theory of mind. Mind Lang. 7, 172–186. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0017.1992.tb00203.x
Baron-cohen S. Wheelwright S. Hill J. Raste Y. Plumb I. (2001). The ‘“Reading the mind in the eyes”’ test revised version: a study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry 42, 241–251. doi: 10.1111/1469-7610.00715
Beike D. R. Cole H. E. Merrick C. R. (2017). Sharing specific “we” autobiographical memories in close relationships: the role of contact frequency. Memory 25, 1425–1434. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2017.1313990, PMID: 28395590
Benedek M. Daxberger D. Annerer-Walcher S. Smallwood J. (2018). Are you with me? Probing the human capacity to recognize external/internal attention in others’ faces. Vis. Cogn. 26, 511–517. doi: 10.1080/13506285.2018.1504845, PMID: 30370428
Benedek M. Stoiser R. Walcher S. Körner C. (2017). Eye behavior associated with internally versus externally directed cognition. Front. Psychol. 8, 1–9. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01092, PMID: 28713304
Berntsen D. (2010). The unbidden past: involuntary autobiographical memories as a basic mode of remembering. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 19, 138–142. doi: 10.1177/0963721410370301
Chun M. M. Golomb J. D. Turk-Browne N. B. (2011). A taxonomy of external and internal attention. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 62, 73–101. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100427
Costa M. Dinsbach W. Manstead A. S. R. Ricci Bitti P. E. (2001). Social presence, embarrassment, and nonverbal behavior. J. Nonverbal Behav. 25, 225–240. doi: 10.1023/A:1012544204986
Diamantopoulos G. Woolley S. I. Spann M. (2009). A critical review of past research into the neuro-linguistic programming eye-accessing cues model. Curr. Res. NLP 1, 8–22.
Doherty-Sneddon G. Bonner L. Bruce V. (2001). Cognitive demands of face monitoring: evidence for visuospatial overload. Mem. Cogn. 29, 909–919. doi: 10.3758/BF03195753, PMID: 11820750
Doherty-Sneddon G. Phelps F. G. (2005). Gaze aversion: A response to cognitive or social difficulty? Mem. Cogn. 33, 727–733. doi: 10.3758/BF03195338
Droulers O. Adil S. (2015). Perceived gaze direction modulates ad memorization. J. Neurosci. Psychol. Econ. 8, 15–26. doi: 10.1037/npe0000029
El Haj M. Antoine P. Nandrino J. L. (2016). More emotional facial expressions during episodic than during semantic autobiographical retrieval. Cogn. Affect. Behav. Neurosci. 16, 374–381. doi: 10.3758/s13415-015-0397-9, PMID: 26667366
Emery N. J. (2000). The eyes have it: the neuroethology, function and evolution of social gaze. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 24, 581–604. PMID: 10940436
Fang Y. Nakashima R. Matsumiya K. Kuriki I. Shioiri S. (2015). Eye-head coordination for visual cognitive processing. PLoS One 10:e0121035 doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0121035, PMID: 25799510
Faul F. Erdfelder E. Buchner A. Lang A.-G. (2009). Statistical power analyses using G*power 3.1: tests for correlation and regression analyses. Behav. Res. Methods 41, 1149–1160. doi: 10.3758/BRM.41.4.1149, PMID: 19897823
Franchak J. M. McGee B. Blanch G. (2021). Adapting the coordination of eyes and head to differences in task and environment during fully-mobile visual exploration. PLoS One 16, e0256463–e0256417. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0256463, PMID: 34415981
Frischen A. Bayliss A. P. Tipper S. P. (2007). Gaze cueing of attention: visual attention, social cognition, and individual differences. Psychol. Bull. 133, 694–724. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.133.4.694, PMID: 17592962
Glenberg A. M. Schroeder J. L. Robertson D. A. (1998). Averting the gaze disengages the environment and facilitates remembering. Mem. Cogn. 26, 651–658. doi: 10.3758/BF03211385, PMID: 9701957
Haxby J. V. Hoffman E. A. Gobbini M. I. (2000). The distributed human neural system for face perception. Trends Cogn. Sci. 4, 223–233. doi: 10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01482-0, PMID: 28689088
Hoerl C. McCormack T. (2005). Joint reminiscing as joint attention to the past. In N. Eilan, C. Hoerl, T. McCormack, and J. Roessler (Eds.), Joint attention: Communication and other minds: Issues in philosophy and psychology (pp. 260–286). Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245635.003.0012
Huang T. Mei Y. Zhang H. Liu S. Yang H. (2019). Fine-grained engagement recognition in online learning environment. ICEIEC 2019- proc. 2019 IEEE 9th Int. Conf. Electron. Inf. Emerg. Commun., 338–341. doi: 10.1109/ICEIEC.2019.8784559
Kobayashi H. Kohshima S. (2001). Unique morphology of the human eye and its adaptive meaning: comparative studies on external morphology of the primate eye. J. Hum. Evol. 40, 419–435. doi: 10.1006/jhev.2001.0468, PMID: 11322803
Land M. F. Tatler B. W. (2009). Looking and acting: Vision and eye movements in natural behaviour. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Landis J. R. Koch G. G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics 33:159. doi: 10.2307/2529310
Lenoble Q. El Haj M. (2021). “Look at me” - eye movements during autobiographical retrieval in face-to-face interactions. J. Psychophysiol. 35, 237–242. doi: 10.1027/0269-8803/a000276
McCarthy A. Lee K. Itakura S. Muir D. W. (2008). Gaze display when thinking depends on culture and context. J. Cross-Cult. Psychol. 39, 716–729. doi: 10.1177/0022022108323807
Moukheiber A. Rautureau G. Perez-Diaz F. Soussignan R. Dubal S. Jouvent R. et al. (2010). Gaze avoidance in social phobia: objective measure and correlates. Behav. Res. Ther. 48, 147–151. doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2009.09.012, PMID: 19863948
Nakashima R. Shioiri S. (2014). Why do we move our head to look at an object in our peripheral region? Lateral viewing interferes with attentive search. PLoS One 9:e92284. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0092284, PMID: 24647634
Nummenmaa L. Calder A. J. (2009). Neural mechanisms of social attention. Trends Cogn. Sci. 13, 135–143. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2008.12.006
Pasupathi M. (2001). The social contruction of the personal past and its implications for adult development. Psychol. Bull. 127, 651–672. doi: 10.1037//0033-2909.127.5.651
Previc F. H. Declerck C. de Brabander B. (2005). Why your “head is in the clouds,” during thinking: the relationship between cognition and upper space. Acta Psychol. 118, 7–24. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2004.10.012, PMID: 15627407
Renoult L. Irish M. Moscovitch M. Rugg M. D. (2019). From knowing to remembering: the semantic–episodic distinction. Trends Cogn. Sci. 23, 1041–1057. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2019.09.008, PMID: 31672430
Rochat N. Delmas H. Denault V. Elissalde B. Demarchi S. (2018). La synergologie révisée par les pairs. Analyse d’une publication. Rev. québécoise Psychol. 39, 271–290. doi: 10.7202/1051231ar
Ruhland K. Peters C. E. Andrist S. Badler J. B. Badler N. I. Gleicher M. et al. (2015). A review of eye gaze in virtual agents, social robotics and HCI: behaviour generation, user interaction and perception. Comput. Graph. Forum 34, 299–326. doi: 10.1111/cgf.12603
Salvi C. Bowden E. M. (2016). Looking for creativity: where do we look when we look for new ideas? Front. Psychol. 7, 1–12. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00161, PMID: 26913018
Smallwood J. Schooler J. W. (2006). The restless mind. Psychol. Psychol. Bull. 132, 946–958. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.132.6.946, PMID: 28689088
Tulving E. (2002). Episodic memory: from mind to brain. Annu. Rev. 53, 1–25. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.53.100901.135114
Turkstra L. S. (2005). Looking while listening and speaking: eye-to-face gaze in adolescents with and without traumatic brain injury. J. Speech. Lang. Hear. Res. 48, 1429–1441. doi: 10.1044/1092-4388(2005/099)
Walcher S. Körner C. Benedek M. (2017). Looking for ideas: eye behavior during goal-directed internally focused cognition. Conscious. Cogn. 53, 165–175. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2017.06.009, PMID: 28689088
Wiseman R. Watt C. Brinke L. Porter S. Couper S. L. Rankin C. (2012). The eyes don’t have it: lie detection and neuro-linguistic programming. PLoS One 7, 1–6. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0040259, PMID: 22808128
