New study by Srijita Karmakar reveals how we follow another person's gaze in complex, real-world scenes

When we watch someone turn to look at something, we often follow their gaze almost instantly: a fast, automatic behavior that underlies much of human social interaction, from coordinating attention to anticipating what others will do next. A new study from VIU lab grad student Srijita Karmakar, published in the Journal of Vision, examines how this everyday skill holds up in the visual complexity of natural scenes.

Using dynamic video stimuli of real-world scenes, the researchers recorded participants' eye movements as they searched for a target person while a "gazer" shifted their head to look toward other individuals. By measuring the accuracy, amplitude, and timing of viewers' first saccades, the study isolated how several features of naturalistic scenes shape gaze-following behavior.

The findings show that a foveal gazer meaningfully improves how accurately observers locate a gaze goal, but mainly when that goal is far in the periphery (roughly 9 degrees of visual angle or more from fixation). When multiple potential gaze goals were present, viewers tended to first saccade toward the individual nearest the gazer, and the presence of several candidate goals both sped up saccade latencies and increased anticipatory eye movements made before the gazer had even finished turning their head.

Together, these results extend gaze-following research beyond simplified laboratory displays into the richer, more ambiguous conditions of the real world, and inform broader theories of attention and real-world decision-making.