Gazing into space: perceiving another’s gaze vergence and fixation distance in three-dimensional space

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Copyright: Nguyen, Alysha
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Abstract
Understanding the eyes of others is vital for navigating the complex social world around us. Where someone is looking provides information about not only the focus of their attention, but also their current thoughts, emotions and intentions. Shifts in another’s gaze direction can reflexively orient our attention towards the object of their fixation, an effect known as “gaze cueing” (Friesen and Kingstone, 1998). Despite much research on perceiving gaze direction, little is known about gaze vergence. Our eyes converge as the object of our fixation moves closer to us and become parallel as that object moves farther away. Fixation distance information obtained from perceiving gaze vergence could potentially allow us to refine a general sense of the direction in which a person is looking to recover a more precise point of fixation in three-dimensional space. The experiments in this thesis utilise a three-dimensional stereoscopic display to investigate how observers perceive the gaze vergence of a computer-generated avatar and whether gaze vergence can cue attention to locations in depth. Chapter One finds that when perceiving another’s gaze vergence, fixation distance is systematically underestimated, especially when the avatar’s gaze is averted downwards. Chapters Two to Five apply this stereoscopic setup to gaze cueing and find that the gaze direction cueing effect persists in a three-dimensional environment. However, shifts in another’s gaze vergence do not reflexively orient attention to locations in depth, even across several temporal and spatial variations. Nevertheless, a significant stimulus location effect persists across these experiments, whereby the object closer to the avatar is detected more quickly than the farther object, irrespective of the avatar’s gaze fixation location. This effect was explored in Chapter Six. Participants’ reaction times are increased when the avatar’s eyes are open, regardless of the object’s location. The mere presence of open eyes can therefore capture attention even when detrimental to the task at hand. Overall, the results suggest that despite our ability to discriminate gaze vergence precisely, vergence cues may not be utilised readily in daily life to facilitate attention or to locate others’ precise fixation location in three-dimensional space.
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Author(s)
Nguyen, Alysha
Supervisor(s)
Clifford, Colin
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Publication Year
2019
Resource Type
Thesis
Degree Type
PhD Doctorate
UNSW Faculty
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