title: My eyes want to look where your eyes are looking: exploring the tendency to imitate another individual's gaze.
abstract: In this study we investigated the tendency of humans to imitate the gaze direction of other individuals. Distracting gaze stimuli or non biological directional cues (arrows) were presented to observers performing an instructed saccadic eye movement task. Eye movement recordings showed that observers performed less accurately when the distracting gaze and the instructed saccade had opposite directions, with a substantial number of saccades matching the direction of the distracting gaze. Static (Experiment 1) and dynamic (Experiment 2) gaze distracters, but not pointing arrows (Experiment 3), produced the effect. Results show a strong predisposition of humans to imitate somebody else's oculomotor behaviour, even when detrimental to task performance. This is likely linked to a strong tendency to share attentional states of other individuals, known as joint attention.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurological and Vision Sciences, Section of Physiology, University of Verona, Strada Le Grazie 8, 37134 Verona Cognitive Science Laboratory, Rovereto Branch, University of Trento, Italy.
authors.forename: Paola
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ricciardelli
authors.forename: Emanuela
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bricolo
authors.forename: Salvatore M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Aglioti
authors.forename: Leonardo
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Chelazzi
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology*; D012919:Social Behavior