Social Modulation Of On-Screen Looking Behaviour

While passive social information (e.g. pictures of people) routinely draws one's eyes, our willingness to look at live others is more nuanced. People tend not to stare at strangers and will modify their gaze behaviour to avoid sending undesirable social signals; yet they often continue to monitor others covertly "out of the corner of their eyes." What this means for looks that are being made near to live others is unknown. Will the eyes be drawn towards the other person, or pushed away? We evaluate changes in two elements of gaze control: image-independent principles guiding how people look (e.g. biases to make eye movements along the cardinal directions) and image-dependent principles guiding what people look at (e.g. a preference for meaningful content within a scene). Participants were asked to freely view semantically unstructured (fractals) and semantically structured (rotated landscape) images, half of which were located in the space near to a live other. We found that eye movements were horizontally displaced away from a visible other starting at 1032 ms after stimulus onset when fractals but not landscapes were viewed. We suggest that the avoidance of looking towards live others extends to the near space around them, at least in the absence of semantically meaningful gaze targets.