Head and body cues guide eye movements and facilitate target search in real-world videos

Static gaze cues presented in central vision result in observer shifts of covert attention and eye movements, and benefits in perceptual performance in the detection of simple targets. Less is known about how dynamic gazer behaviors with head and body motion influence search eye movements and performance in perceptual tasks in real-world scenes. Participants searched for a target person (yes/no task, 50% presence), whereas watching videos of one to three gazers looking at a designated person (50% valid gaze cue, looking at the target). To assess the contributions of different body parts, we digitally erase parts of the gazers in the videos to create three different body parts/whole conditions for gazers: floating heads (only head movements), headless bodies (only lower body movements), and the baseline condition with intact head and body. We show that valid dynamic gaze cues guided participants’ eye movements (up to 3 fixations) closer to the target, speeded the time to foveate the target, reduced fixations to the gazers, and improved target detection. The effect of gaze cues in guiding eye movements to the search target was the smallest when the gazer's head was removed from the videos. To assess the inherent information about gaze goal location for each body parts/whole condition, we collected perceptual judgments estimating gaze goals by a separate group of observers with unlimited time. Observers’ perceptual judgments showed larger estimate errors when the gazer's head was removed. This suggests that the reduced eye movement guidance from lower body cueing is related to observers’ difficulty extracting gaze information without the presence of the head. Together, the study extends previous work by evaluating the impact of dynamic gazer behaviors on search with videos of real-world cluttered scenes.