Experiences justify beliefs about our environment. Sometimes the justification is immediate: seeing a red light immediately justifies believing there is a red light. Other times the justification is mediate: seeing a red light justifies believing one should brake in a way that is mediated by background knowledge of traffic signals. How does this distinction map onto the distinction between what is and what isn't part of the content of experience? Epistemic egalitarians think that experiences immediately justify whatever is part of (...) their content. Epistemic elitists deny this and think that there is some further constraint the contents of experience must satisfy to be immediately justified. Here I defend epistemic elitism, propose a phenomenological account of what the further constraint is, and explore the resulting view's consequences for our knowledge of other minds, and in particular for perceptual theories of this knowledge. (shrink)

Among the studies on the perception of gaze vs. non-gaze stimuli, some have shown that the two types of stimuli trigger different patterns of attentional effects, while others have reported no such differences. In three experiments, we investigated the role of stimulus perceivability in spatial interference effects when the targets were gaze vs. non-gaze stimuli. We used a spatial Stroop task that required participants to make a speeded response to the direction indicated by the targets located on the left or (...) right side of fixation. In different experiments, the targets consisted of eyes, symbols, and/or arrows. The results showed that the magnitude of the spatial congruency effect differed between the types of targets when stimulus perceivability was not controlled. However, when the perceivability of the task relevant parts was comparable between the different types of targets, similar congruency effects were found regardless of target type. These results underscore the importance of controlling for stimulus perceivability, which is closely linked to the attentional zoom required to perform a task, when making inferences about the attentional mechanisms in the processing of gaze vs. non-gaze stimuli. (shrink)

Infants acquire their first words through interactions with social partners. In the first year of life, infants receive a high frequency of visual and auditory input from faces, making faces a potential strong social cue in facilitating word-to-world mappings. In this position paper, we review how and when infant gaze to faces is likely to support their subsequent vocabulary outcomes. We assess the relevance of infant gaze to faces selectively, in three domains: infant gaze to different features within a face (...) ; then to faces ; and finally to more socially relevant types of faces. We argue that infant gaze to faces could scaffold vocabulary construction, but its relevance may be impacted by the developmental level of the infant and the type of task with which they are presented. Gaze to faces proves relevant to vocabulary, as gazes to eyes could inform about the communicative nature of the situation or about the labeled object, while gazes to the mouth could improve word processing, all of which are key cues to highlighting word-to-world pairings. We also discover gaps in the literature regarding how infants’ gazes to faces or to different types of faces relate to vocabulary outcomes. An important direction for future research will be to fill these gaps to better understand the social factors that influence infant vocabulary outcomes. (shrink)

Observing averted eye gaze results in the automatic allocation of attention to the gazed-at location. The role of the orientation of the face that produces the gaze cue was investigated. The eyes in the face could look left or right in a head-centred frame, but the face itself could be oriented 90 degrees clockwise or anticlockwise such that the eyes were gazing up or down. Significant cueing effects to targets presented to the left or right of the screen were found (...) in these head orientation conditions. This suggests that attention was directed to the side to which the eyes would have been looking towards, had the face been presented upright. This finding provides evidence that head orientation can affect gaze following, even when the head orientation alone is not a social cue. It also shows that the mechanism responsible for the allocation of attention following a gaze cue can be influenced by intrinsic object-based (i.e. head-centred) properties of the task-irrelevant cue. (shrink)

Being in the bodily presence of others facilitates important perceptual, social, and informational advantages. For example, it enables direct access to other subjects’ embodied perspectives, motivates intersubjective engagements, and is involved in the construction of shared experiences and joint actions. These advantages are based on and gained through attending to and with others, i.e. they rely on social attention. It is no surprise, therefore, that a growing body of empirical data indicates that social attention is a special attentional state that (...) involves specific behavioral and neural-cognitive properties. Another important feature of the human capacity for social attention, which is highlighted in this article is that in everyday environments social attention considerably extends and enriches the subject’s attentional field. This idea draws on phenomenological considerations and on findings from cognitive science research that suggest that subjects can attend to more than in the center of their attention and that under normal conditions we can gain more features and more situations when attending to the movements, gestures, and facial expressions of others. The influence of others on the structure of our attentional field is evident from situations where others are absent from our daily surroundings. In these circumstances our attentional field narrows and the world transforms into an unfamiliar and sometimes uncanny place. Intriguingly, the same most likely occurs in social pathologies such as BPD and SAD, in which the bodily presence of others does not generate the emotional response we see in healthy humans even though the subject’s basic capacity for social attention is intact. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between the bodily presence of other humans in the lived urban world and the experience of everyday architecture. We suggest, from the perspectives of phenomenology and architecture, that being in the company of others changes the way the built environment appears to subjects, and that this enables us to perform simple daily tasks while still attending to the built environment. Our analysis shows that in mundane urban settings attending to the environment involves a unique attentional (...) mode, which does not rely on concentrating on, or appreciating the architectural objects, but rather on social attention and on the subject’s kinesthesis in relation to the built environment. (shrink)

A basic principle of objectification theory is that a mere glance from a stranger represents the potential to be sexualized, triggering women to take on the perspective of others and become vigilant to their appearance. However, research has yet to document gendered gaze patterns in social groups. The present study examined visual attention in groups of varying gender composition to understand how gender and minority status influence gaze behavior. One hundred undergraduates enrolled in psychology courses were photographed, and an additional (...) 76 participants viewed groupings of these photographs while their point of gaze was recorded using a remote eye-tracking device. Participants were not told that their gaze was being recorded. Women were viewed more frequently and for longer periods of time than men in mixed-gender groups. Women were also more likely to be looked at first and last by observers. Men spent more time attending to pictures of women when fewer women were in the group. The opposite effect was found for pictures of men, such that male pictures were viewed less when fewer pictures of men were in the group. Female observers spent more time looking at men compared to male observers, and male observers spent more time looking at women than female observers, though both female and male observers looked at women more than men overall. Consistent with objectification theory, women’s appearance garners more attention and interest in mixed-gender social groups. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPopular culture has many examples of evil characters having vertically pupilled eyes. Humans have a long evolutionary history of rivalry with snakes and their visual systems were evolved to rapidly detect snakes and snake-related cues. Considering such evolutionary background, we hypothesised that humans would perceive vertical pupils, which are characteristics of ambush predators including some of the snakes, as threatening. In seven studies conducted on samples from American and Turkish samples, we found that vertical pupils are perceived as more threatening (...) on both explicit and implicit level and they are associated with physical, rather than social, threat. Findings provided partial support regarding our hypothesis about the relevance of snake detection processes: Snake phobia, and not spider phobia, was found to be related to perceiving vertical pupils as threatening, however an experimental manipulation of saliency of snakes re... (shrink)

From playing basketball to ordering at a food counter, we frequently and effortlessly coordinate our attention with others towards a common focus: we look at the ball, or point at a piece of cake. This non-verbal coordination of attention plays a fundamental role in our social lives: it ensures that we refer to the same object, develop a shared language, understand each other’s mental states, and coordinate our actions. Models of joint attention generally attribute this accomplishment to gaze coordination. But (...) are visual attentional mechanisms sufficient to achieve joint attention, in all cases? Besides cases where visual information is missing, we show how combining it with other senses can be helpful, and even necessary to certain uses of joint attention. We explain the two ways in which non-visual cues contribute to joint attention: either as enhancers, when they complement gaze and pointing gestures in order to coordinate joint attention on visible objects, or as modality pointers, when joint attention needs to be shifted away from the whole object to one of its properties, say weight or texture. This multisensory approach to joint attention has important implications for social robotics, clinical diagnostics, pedagogy and theoretical debates on the construction of a shared world. (shrink)