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Thank you for making changes, I believe the manuscript has been improved.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Jafri Abdullah, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
Looking over the reviewer comments, I note that all comments are quite minor. Most are simply requesting some further little clarification across different places in the paper. I encourage the authors to go through the comments and provide the clarifications. I can see how adding these clarifications will improve the paper. Any reviewer comments that the authors do not agree with, please provide a rebuttal as to why edits were not made. From what I can see there doesn't appear to be anything I expect would be of any issue.
The work is written well, and the introduction is comprehensive and informative. The study itself is ambitious and well executed. I am familiar with the previous work and this is an interesting and appropriate follow up. The research question is clear, relevant and timely. The study is well reported and the materials and data are open which is good.
The work is original and the research question is well defined and clear. The analysis seems comprehensive and appropriate. Methods section is clear and comprehensive.
I did have a couple of issues with regards to reporting here:
1. There is no clear sample size justification.
2. Line 206, page 10 – what is meant by responded appropriately – please provide detail.
3. related to 2, more needs to be explained about the algorithm used to create realistic gaze.
4. How long did participants spend in the study?
The conclusions are appropriate and measured. data is provided and stats seem valid.
I do have one issue with the conclusions in terms of interpretation of the arrow cue. I think there is a further possible way to interpret the arrow cue with respect to the instructions/ framing the participant is given around the arrow cue. Participants are told that the ‘computer-controlled arrow stimulus was used to guide them to the correct location’. This gives the arrow a much stronger meaning than the gaze which is supposed to just be another person looking at the stimuli. It therefore makes it possible that the participants saw the arrow as more meaningful than the gaze, leading to the reaction times differences and the seemingly unadaptive use of the arrow. This makes me wonder what would the participants have done if they believed the eyegaze was the computer (or another person) explicitly guiding them, or if they were told the arrow was random? This issue needs to be discussed, and should be considered for further study.
Overall, this manuscript clearly provides enough details of the study. Figures are helpful in understanding the task. All raw data is supplied online including R code.
This study aimed to examine how the informativeness of another’s non-communicative eye movements influences joint attention using a gaze-contingent paradigm. There were two independent factors, the factor of context (Predictive, No-Search, Random) and stimulus (Eyes, Arrows), with a within-subjects design. The authors adapted the stimuli and task originally implemented by Caruana et al. This gaze-contingent paradigm of implicit joint attention would be useful to investigate spontaneous joint attention.
Line 173～ Participants
・Have you conducted sample size estimation?
・What was the gender ratio of the participants? It should be clearly reported since some studies have reported gender differences in gaze sensitivity.
Line 277～
・The authors mentioned that 6 people reported noticing the difference between Alan’s and Tony’s search patterns. Have you conducted analyses excluding these 6 participants?
Line 310～ Statistical analyses
・How many trials were excluded from the analyses?
Line 414～ Model fit analyses
・Can you present data on model fitting such as the AIC and BIC? To compare the model fitting levels, each model's index of fitting should be reported.
Lines 485-489
・The authors mentioned that experience may modulate responses to gaze cues. However, participants were faster to respond to Arrows than Eyes in general (Lines 396-397). It may be hypothesised that arrow cues cannot induce rapid responses if the amount of the experiences influences saccades. The authors should mention the different mechanisms of attention orientation between arrow- and gaze-cueing situations rather than discussing how experience modulates attentional responses.
Lines 528-530
Although the authors mentioned the limitation that the eye contact stimulus was more visually salient than the fixation point, in that case, other results of the difference between Arrow and Eyes also have to be more moderate. Again, I recommend discussing the difference in attention orientation mechanisms between Arrow and Gaze cues.
Thank you for providing me the opportunity to review this interesting study. Especially, the gaze-contingent paradigm used in this study has potential interest for researchers in social cognition. Since this task can measure spontaneous joint attention, it would be interesting to use the same task in people with ASD.
As mentioned above, I just have some concerns about the statistics and discussion. It would be challenging to integrate the current results, however, I would like to see the authors’ original theoretical contributions. The current discussion seems to explain each result separately rather than emphasising the theoretical contributions of this study.
This paper illustrates an eye-tracking study in which participants were engaged in a gaze-contingency task with an avatar (social condition) or a dynamic arrow (non-social condition). The main results show that the participants were influenced by the gaze of the avatar when looking for a target, and this was particularly evident when the gaze of the avatar was informative about the location of the target. In addition, these results were much more evident in the social than in the non-social condition.
I have appreciated this paper, which is well written and organized. I only proposed some comments aimed at increasing some theoretical motivations underlying this work.
1) Introduction
- Line 50-51: there are a couple of more recent and relevant reviews on this topic that I’m missing (Dalmaso, Castelli, et al., 2020; McKay et al., 2021)
- I have appreciated the fact that you also introduced the control non-social conditions with arrows, which is important to establish whether a given phenomenon is truly social or not; however, I feel that the theoretical motivation for this control condition should be better motivated; for instance, there is a recent meta-analyses showing that gaze and arrow seems to lead to vert similar results in social attention tasks, at least at the behavioral level (Chacón-Candia et al., 2022)
- Related to my previous comment, I’m wondering why in the control ‘non-social’ condition you decided to maintain the picture of the face with closed eyes; I can understand the advantage of presenting participants with a similar perceptual stimulus, but at the same time I’m wondering if this condition can be actually labelled as truly ‘non-social’
Methods
- Line 201-202: you primed participants with a cover story saying that it was an interactive game with another person placed in another laboratory; I’m wondering if this was necessary to observe the results you reported here; do you think that a different pattern could emerge if no cover story was provided? This manipulation reminds me of some work showing that ‘mental state’ attribution can shape responses to social attention responses (e.g. Wiese et al., 2014)
- Please clarify how the sample size was established (e.g., power analysis?); I am wondering if N = 31 (which seems relatively small) is enough to detect the effects that you wanted to examine.
- RTs analyses: you discarded trials with an RT < 150 ms (i.e., anticipations); what about trials with an excessive latency (i.e., outliers? If any). Please clarify.
Results
- As 6 participants reported differences between ‘Alan’ and ‘Tony’, I am wondering if these people have been included in the final analyses.
- I think it would be better to report p < .001 instead of p <.000
- Line 397: technically speaking, p = .05 is a non-significant result; please verify.
Discussion
- Line 508-509: I am missing another relevant work showing that eye contact can also increase the oculomotor response in a gaze cueing task (Dalmaso, Alessi et al., 2020)
- Lines 542-546: Please note that there is indeed evidence for the notion that direct-gaze stimuli can hold attention as reflected in oculomotor indexes; please see (Dalmaso et al., 2017) which could be briefly mentioned.
References
Chacón-Candia, J. A., Román-Caballero, R., Aranda-Martín, B., Casagrande, M., Lupiáñez, J., & Marotta, A. (2022). Are there quantitative differences between eye-gaze and arrow cues? A meta-analytic answer to the debate and a call for qualitative differences. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 104993. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104993
Dalmaso, M., Alessi, G., Castelli, L., & Galfano, G. (2020). Eye contact boosts the reflexive component of overt gaze following. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 4777. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-61619-6
Dalmaso, M., Castelli, L., & Galfano, G. (2017). Attention holding elicited by direct-gaze faces is reflected in saccadic peak velocity. Experimental Brain Research, 235(11), 3319–3332. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-017-5059-4
Dalmaso, M., Castelli, L., & Galfano, G. (2020). Social modulators of gaze-mediated orienting of attention: A review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 27(5), 833–855. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-020-01730-x
McKay, K. T., Grainger, S. A., Coundouris, S. P., Skorich, D. P., Phillips, L. H., & Henry, J. D. (2021). Visual attentional orienting by eye gaze: A meta-analytic review of the gaze-cueing effect. Psychological Bulletin, 147(12), 1269–1289. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000353
Wiese, E., Wykowska, A., & Müller, H. J. (2014). What we observe is biased by what other people tell us: beliefs about the reliability of gaze behavior modulate attentional orienting to gaze cues. PloS One, 9(4), e94529. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094529
Please see my previous comments
Please see my previous comments
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