Colombatto, Clara; Chen, Yi-Chia; Scholl, Brian J; (2024) Perceived gaze dynamics in social interactions can alter (and even reverse) the perceived temporal order of events. Cognition , 247 , Article 105745. 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105745.

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Abstract

Here's an all-too-familiar scenario: Person A is staring at person B, and then B turns toward A, and A immediately looks away (a phenomenon we call ‘gaze deflection’). Beyond perceiving lower-level properties here — such as the timing of the eye/head turns — you can also readily perceive seemingly higher-level social dynamics: A got caught staring, and frantically looked away in embarrassment! It seems natural to assume that such social impressions are based on more fundamental representations of what happened when — but here we show that social gaze dynamics are unexpectedly powerful in that they can actually alter (and even reverse) the perceived temporal order of the underlying events. Across eight experiments, observers misperceived B as turning before A, when in fact they turned simultaneously — and even when B was turning after A. Additional controls confirmed that this illusion depends on visual processing (vs. being driven solely by higher-level interpretations), and that it is specific to the perception of social agents (vs. non-social objects). This demonstrates how social perception is tightly integrated into our perceptual experience of the world, and can have powerful consequences for one of the most basic properties that we can perceive: what happens when.

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