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    Direct gaze facilitates rapid orienting to faces: evidence from express saccades and saccadic potentials

    Mares, Ines and Smith, Marie L. and Johnson, Mark H. and Senju, Atsushi (2016) Direct gaze facilitates rapid orienting to faces: evidence from express saccades and saccadic potentials. Biological Psychology 121 (A), pp. 84-90. ISSN 0301-0511.

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    Abstract

    Direct gaze is a crucial signal in human social communication, which is known to attract visual attention and modulate a wide range of behaviours. The present study investigated whether direct gaze facilitates rapid orienting to faces, which is important for adaptive on-line communication, and its neural correlates. Fifteen participants performed a rapid orienting task, in which they were instructed to saccade to peripherally presented buildings or faces containing direct or averted gaze as quickly as possible. Electroencephalographic recordings were made during the task. Shorter express saccade latencies were found for faces with direct gaze, compared to averted gaze or buildings, while no significant difference was found between faces with averted gaze and buildings. Furthermore, saccade-locked event-related potential (ERP) amplitudes in parieto-occipital areas discriminated faces with direct gaze from buildings and faces with averted gaze corroborating behavioural results. These results show that detection of direct gaze facilitates rapid orienting to faces.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Saccade-locked event-related potentials, Express saccades, Direct gaze, Face detection
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Research Centres and Institutes: Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD)
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 17 Oct 2016 07:58
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:27
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/16346

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