If one person looks up, you often see others follow suit. We are hardwired to do this, unconsciously, automatically, but there are times when we don’t need to react to someone’s eye movement - and our brains know the difference.
“The brain is reading people’s minds, not just where they
are looking,” says Brian Scholl, a professor of psychology at Yale University
and the senior author of a new study published in ‘Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences’.
Our brains can derive meaning from looking into another
person’s eyes. We know when we might need to see what they are seeing (a
potential threat or point of interest) or whether they are just breaking eye contact.
People look off to the side, up or down all the time. They may be breaking
contact to relieve tension or eye accessing, perhaps looking up and left to recall
a memory, or maybe they have been caught looking somewhere they shouldn’t have
been. On all these occasions there’s no need for us (the observers) to look where
they look. And we don’t. It’s like we know the difference, instinctively, without
conscious thought.
This led the researchers to conclude that the observer’s brain
automatically understands that there is no significance to the location where
the embarrassed party is looking.
“The brain is a lot smarter than we thought,” says Scholl. In
a series of experiments, Scholl, Clara Colombatto of Yale and Yi-Chia Chen of
Harvard showed that the brain only turn the eyes to the focus of someone else’s
gaze when it assesses that the gaze to be ‘significant’.
“Eye and head movements after you're ‘caught’ during gaze
deflection do not automatically orient others' attention — presumably because
the brain can tell that such looks aren't directed toward anything in
particular, but rather are just directed away from the person who was caught
staring,” Scholl said. “This shows how the brain is specialized not to perceive
others' eyes, but rather to perceive the mind behind the eyes.”
This makes sense. Observing gaze direction and how others
respond to it, it’s clear that we follow the eyes in some situations and don’t
in others. It’s also obvious that this is done too quickly for a conscious decision
to have been made. In these days of face masks, we are all focusing more on
reading emotions and intentions from the eyes and eyebrows, and it’s
encouraging that we have this ability to know which eye movements are in
directions that might be worth following and which aren’t.
Following their researcher, the team at Yale write: “This
serves as a case study of both how social dynamics can shape visual attention
in a sophisticated manner and how vision science can contribute to our
understanding of common social phenomena.”
The studies show that the difference between a shift gaze towards something significant (such as the appearance of a threatening third party) or nothing in particular (the observed had just been caught staring) is something we can recognise.