title: Making eye contact without awareness.
abstract: Direct gaze is a potent non-verbal signal that establishes a communicative connection between two individuals, setting the course for further interactions. Although consciously perceived faces with direct gaze have been shown to capture attention, it is unknown whether an attentional preference for these socially meaningful stimuli exists even in the absence of awareness. In two experiments, we recorded participants' eye movements while they were exposed to faces with direct and averted gaze rendered invisible by interocular suppression. Participants' inability to correctly guess the occurrence of the faces in a manual forced-choice task demonstrated complete unawareness of the faces. However, eye movements were preferentially directed towards faces with direct compared to averted gaze, indicating a specific sensitivity to others' gaze directions even without awareness. This oculomotor preference suggests that a rapid and automatic establishment of mutual eye contact constitutes a biological advantage, which could be mediated by fast subcortical pathways in the human brain.
authors.affiliation: Visual Perception Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, Germany. Electronic address: marcus.rothkirch@charite.de.
authors.forename: Marcus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rothkirch
authors.affiliation: Visual Perception Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, Germany; International Graduate Program Medical Neurosciences, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Luisenstr. 56, 10117 Berlin, Germany. Electronic address: apoorva-rajiv.madipakkam@charite.de.
authors.forename: Apoorva Rajiv
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Madipakkam
authors.affiliation: Visual Perception Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, Germany; Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Philippstr. 13, 10115 Berlin, Germany. Electronic address: erik.m.rehn@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Erik
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Rehn
authors.affiliation: Visual Perception Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, Germany; Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Philippstr. 13, 10115 Berlin, Germany. Electronic address: philipp.sterzer@charite.de.
authors.forename: Philipp
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sterzer
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012938:Social Perception; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Eye movements; Face perception; Gaze direction; Social cognition; Unconscious processing