The Effect Of An Auditory Signals On Ones Perception Of...

In this article, the researchers studied the effect of an auditory signal on one’s perception of eye gaze. They mention that people are born with the ability to differentiate between direct and adverted gaze, and this ability becomes increasingly important throughout adulthood. Another important social signal involves a person’s auditory system. In infancy, children become sensitive to hearing their own name. This auditory signal often occurs at the same time as direct eye contact. The researchers in this study were trying to determine the correlation between someone hearing his/her own name and that person’s perception of the speaker’s gaze. The article mentioned earlier studies have shown that a person’s gaze tends to gravitate†¦show more content†¦There were 6 males and 11 females with a mean age of 24.8 years and a standard deviation of 5.03 years. They used gray-scale photographs with neutral expressions, and altered the positio n of the iris by increments of 1 pixel per image. This created the seven gaze deviations, including: direct gaze and gaze shifts (to both the left and right) of 4, 7, and 10 pixels. For the auditory stimuli, the researchers used recordings of four male speakers who would either say the participant’s actual name or a control name. For the experiment, the researchers placed a monitor in front of the participants and performed 256 randomly presented trials (64 trials represented at direct gaze and 64 trials for each of the three gaze deviations). Each trial started with a central fixation cross on the screen between 500 and 1,750 ms. A variable interval approach was used in order to make sure the participants did not expect the stimuli. After the cross, the participant were shown a face for 600 ms, and they heard a name through headphones. They were given a 2,000 ms interval to press a button, reporting if they perceived the gaze of the face to be looking to the left, ri ght, or directly at them. Result After the experiment, the researchers calculated the range of gaze deviations for the two conditions, own-name and other-name. They called these ranges