Colin Palmer¹ (), Gwenisha Liaw¹, Shui'er Han^2,3; ¹National University of Singapore, ²Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore, ³Centre for Frontier AI Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore

Eye contact is an essential cue in social interactions, yet the physical conditions under which eye contact is felt can vary. For example, viewers can perceive a range of gaze directions, falling across different features of their face, as making 'eye contact' with them, with the position and width of this range varying between individuals. Here, we investigate how characteristics of binocular vision influence the perception of eye contact. Participants (n = 40) made judgements about when they shared eye contact with faces that were rendered in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment that simulates left- and right-eye perspectives onto a 3D scene, in both binocular and monocular viewing conditions. Across trials, the horizontal gaze direction of the faces varied to fixate a range of locations distributed across each participant's face. The gaze directions perceived as making eye contact differed depending on whether participants viewed faces with their left eye, with their right eye, or binocularly. In monocular viewing conditions, gaze directed towards the participant's open eye was most often perceived as making eye contact, while in binocular viewing conditions, gaze directed in between the two eyes was more-often perceived as making eye contact. In general, binocular vision can be weighted towards information received from a specific eye (i.e., the viewer's dominant eye). However, in the current study, the specific gaze directions that viewers perceived as making eye contact with them did not appear to vary with individual differences in sensory eye dominance (measured using an interocular suppression technique) nor sighting dominance (measured with the card test). Future research might investigate the relationship between eye dominance and gaze perception further in populations with more profound imbalances in binocular vision, such as amblyopia.

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by an NUS FASS Start-Up Grant awarded to CP.