Eye spy: Gaze communication and deception during hide-and-seek

Abstract

Gaze behaviour is an important component of successful social interactions. Existing research on social gaze and attention has largely focused on gaze detection and following, rather than the two-way communicative component of gaze that operates between individuals. The present study sought to address this in two experiments. First, "hiders" were eye-tracked while they selected hiding places among a grid of boxes on a computer screen; these boxes were either homogeneous or contained a visually unique pop-out item. Importantly, sometimes hiders believed that their gaze would be seen by hypothetical "seekers" who they might wish to deceive or communicate truthful information to; and sometime hiders believed that their gaze would be concealed. In a second experiment, seekers were asked to select the hiders' locations after viewing the hiders' gaze behaviour, including the eye movements that hiders had been (falsely) told would be concealed. Results indicate that seekers are most accurate when hiders use their gaze to truthfully communicate their selected locations and least accurate when hiders aim to deceive. Notably, both communication and interpretation strategies were affected by the visual display type (e.g., hiders looked to and preferentially selected pop-out items when communicating truthfully while seekers interpreted gaze differently when allocated to these pop-out items), indicating that the visual context can be integrated with gaze to facilitate mis/communication. Our study illuminates how the gaze of an individual acquires and signals information, and that individuals will spontaneously adjust the balance between these two functions based on their current goal and visual environment.

Keywords: Cognition; Eye movements; Perspective taking; Social attention; Theory of mind.