Infants' psychophysiological responses to eye contact with a human and with a humanoid robot.

Eye contact with a human and with a humanoid robot elicits attention- and affect-related psychophysiological responses. However, these responses have mostly been studied in adults, leaving their developmental origin poorly understood. In this study, 114 infants (6-8 months old) viewed direct and averted gaze directions of a live human and an embodied humanoid robot while their heart rate deceleration (attention orienting), skin conductance (affective arousal), and facial muscle activity (affective valence) were measured.

Threat priming diminishes the gaze cueing effect.

Gaze cueing effect (GCE) refers to attention orienting towards the gazed-at location, characterised by faster responses to gazed-at than non-gazed-at stimuli. A previous study investigated the effects of affective priming on GCE and reported that threatening primes enhanced GCE. However, it remains unknown whether the threat or heightened arousal potentiated GCE.

Autonomic and facial electromyographic responses to watching eyes.

We measured participants' psychophysiological responses and gaze behavior while viewing a stimulus person's direct and averted gaze in three different conditions manipulating the participants' experience of being watched. The results showed that skin conductance responses and heart rate deceleration responses were greater to direct than averted gaze only in the condition in which the participants had the experience of being watched by the other individual. In contrast, gaze direction had no effects on these responses when the participants were manipulated to believe that the other individual could not watch them or when the stimulus person was presented in a pre-recorded video.

Emotionally positive self-directed speech widens the cone of gaze.

The perception of another individual's gaze direction is not a low-level, stimulus-driven visual process but a higher-level process that can be top-down modulated, for example, by emotion and theory of mind. The present study investigated the influence of directed (self vs. other) and emotional (positive vs.

Psychophysiological responses to eye contact with a humanoid robot: Impact of perceived intentionality.

Eye contact with a social robot has been shown to elicit similar psychophysiological responses to eye contact with another human. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the attention- and affect-related psychophysiological responses differentiate between direct (toward the observer) and averted gaze mainly when viewing embodied faces that are capable of social interaction, whereas pictorial or pre-recorded stimuli have no such capability. It has been suggested that genuine eye contact, as indicated by the differential psychophysiological responses to direct and averted gaze, requires a feeling of being watched by another mind.