Trajectories of social vision: Eye contact increases saccadic curvature

Saccades are known to deviate away from distractors, and the amplitude of this deviation seems to reflect the salience of these stimuli, as in the case of human faces. Here, we investigated whether eye contact can modulate attention allocation by examining saccadic curvature when faces with closed vs. open eyes act as distractors. In two experiments, participants were asked to perform a vertical saccade towards a symbolic target. At the same time, task-irrelevant faces with open or closed eyes (Experiments 1 and 2) and scrambled faces (Experiment 2) could appear leftwards or rightwards with respect to the ideal trajectory towards the target. Overall, a greater saccadic curvature was observed in response to faces with open eyes, as compared to the other two conditions. These results confirm that eye contact plays an important role in shaping attentional mechanisms and provide further evidence concerning the link between social vision and eye movements.