Dataset Information

Perceiving gaze from head and eye rotations: An integrative challenge for children and adults.

ABSTRACT: Gaze is an emergent visual feature. A person's gaze direction is perceived not just based on the rotation of their eyes, but also their head. At least among adults, this integrative process appears to be flexible such that one feature can be weighted more heavily than the other depending on the circumstances. Yet it is unclear how this weighting might vary across individuals or across development. When children engage emergent gaze, do they prioritize cues from the head and eyes similarly to adults? Is the perception of gaze among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) emergent, or is it reliant on a single feature? Sixty adults (M = 29.86 years-of-age), thirty-seven typically developing children and adolescents (M = 9.3 years-of-age; range = 7-15), and eighteen children with ASD (M = 9.72 years-of-age; range = 7-15) viewed faces with leftward, rightward, or direct head rotations in conjunction with leftward or rightward pupil rotations, and then indicated whether the face was looking leftward or rightward. All individuals, across development and ASD status, used head rotation to infer gaze direction, albeit with some individual differences. However, the use of pupil rotation was heavily dependent on age. Finally, children with ASD used pupil rotation significantly less than typically developing (TD) children when inferring gaze direction, even after accounting for age. Our approach provides a novel framework for understanding individual and group differences in gaze as it is actually perceived-as an emergent feature. Furthermore, this study begins to address an important gap in ASD literature, taking the first look at emergent gaze perception in this population.

SUBMITTER: Mihalache D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6942234 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Perceiving gaze from head and eye rotations: An integrative challenge for children and adults.

Mihalache Diana D Feng Huanghao H Askari Farzaneh F Sokol-Hessner Peter P Moody Eric J EJ Mahoor Mohammad H MH Sweeny Timothy D TD

Developmental science 20190725 2

Gaze is an emergent visual feature. A person's gaze direction is perceived not just based on the rotation of their eyes, but also their head. At least among adults, this integrative process appears to be flexible such that one feature can be weighted more heavily than the other depending on the circumstances. Yet it is unclear how this weighting might vary across individuals or across development. When children engage emergent gaze, do they prioritize cues from the head and eyes similarly to adu ...[more]

PMID: 31271685

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Project description:Backgroundfor many technology-driven visuomotor tasks such as tele-surgery, human operators face situations in which the frames of reference for vision and action are misaligned and need to be compensated in order to perform the tasks with the necessary precision. The cognitive mechanisms for the selection of appropriate frames of reference are still not fully understood. This study investigated the effect of changing visual and kinesthetic frames of reference during wrist pointing, simulating activities typical for tele-operations.Methodsusing a robotic manipulandum, subjects had to perform center-out pointing movements to visual targets presented on a computer screen, by coordinating wrist flexion/extension with abduction/adduction. We compared movements in which the frames of reference were aligned (unperturbed condition) with movements performed under different combinations of visual/kinesthetic dynamic perturbations. The visual frame of reference was centered to the computer screen, while the kinesthetic frame was centered around the wrist joint. Both frames changed their orientation dynamically (angular velocity = 36 degrees /s) with respect to the head-centered frame of reference (the eyes). Perturbations were either unimodal (visual or kinesthetic), or bimodal (visual+kinesthetic). As expected, pointing performance was best in the unperturbed condition. The spatial pointing error dramatically worsened during both unimodal and most bimodal conditions. However, in the bimodal condition, in which both disturbances were in phase, adaptation was very fast and kinematic performance indicators approached the values of the unperturbed condition.Conclusionsthis result suggests that subjects learned to exploit an "affordance" made available by the invariant phase relation between the visual and kinesthetic frames. It seems that after detecting such invariance, subjects used the kinesthetic input as an informative signal rather than a disturbance, in order to compensate the visual rotation without going through the lengthy process of building an internal adaptation model. Practical implications are discussed as regards the design of advanced, high-performance man-machine interfaces.

Dataset Information

Perceiving gaze from head and eye rotations: An integrative challenge for children and adults.

Publications

Perceiving gaze from head and eye rotations: An integrative challenge for children and adults.

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