Feedback-based gaze control in social and non-social information processing contexts

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Lynn Huestegge
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313709549

Efficient gaze control necessarily involves the anticipation of effects (i.e., feedback signals) associated with eye movements. The underlying feedback loops are essential to understand gaze control on several levels, which can be classified with respect to different goals. These goals, which guide our gaze by means of anticipating feedback signals, include cognitive perceptual-informational goals (e.g., optimizing information uptake by ensuring visual stability and optimizing relevant target object processing through foveation), affectrelated goals (whether new information uptake is rewarding or not), but also social goals (e.g., looking around to evaluate and control a social situation). Thus, similar to other action domains, the same action (i.e., an eye movement) can have consequences in different domains of interpretation. While theories on eye movement control are well aware of the relevance of feedback-processing loops regarding perceptual goals (e.g., visual stability), feedback from the environment has yet never been considered. Beside human-computer interfaces utilizing gaze control techniques (e.g., gaze-based menu navigation in modern smartphones), an area in which gaze behavior regularly produces feedback is social interaction, where gaze can be used to control the social environment (e.g., I might gaze at others to have them look back). In this way, a social context is especially suited to study feedback-based control of eye movements. In a preliminary study, we demonstrated that anticipated feedback signals (i.e., geometrical shapes), which occurred contingent upon two distinct eye movements (to the left/right), had a significant impact on gaze control. In the present work program, we would like to further study the underlying mechanisms of this phenomenon. While the preliminary study only involved non-social stimuli, we here additionally transfer the core idea to the processing of social stimuli (faces with salient gaze). Specifically, participants´ eye movements (in social conditions) result in the perception of faces which either display direct or averted gaze. Within four subsections, we study a) the impact of exogenously vs. endogenously triggered goals, b) constraints related to the process of acquiring contingencies between gaze behavior and feedback signals (e.g., by manipulating contingency and contiguity), c) underlying neural signatures of feedback signal processing in oculomotor control, d) potential interactions between (affective and social) control levels, and e) interactions between stimulus dimensions in the feedback loop. The work program is embedded in the research unit by referring to the same multi-level framework of feedback-based action control and by studying the same basic feedback principles. However, a core difference to other projects is the focus on oculomotor control, which has long been regarded as a window to input-related attention processes only, and not as an action modality in its own right.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants