Amit Zehngut¹, Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg¹; ¹Tel-Aviv University

People who are engaged in effortful cognitive processing often avert their gaze peripherally. This gaze aversion (GA) behavior has been interpreted as a distraction-avoidance mechanism, yet evidence also suggests that it is linked to social cognition. Although GAs occur even when individuals are alone, they become larger and more frequent in the presence of others. Therefore, we hypothesize that, in addition to their perceptual role, GAs function as social signals, conveying information about the performer’s cognitive state. In two large-scale studies, we tested this hypothesis by examining how observers interpret others’ oculomotor behavior. In Experiment 1, participants (N=120) watched short (5s) muted videos of individuals, who were either thinking, listening, or performing a tapping task. We employed three between-subject masking conditions: in the no-mask condition, the videos were fully visible; in the eyes-only condition, only the eyes were visible; and in the no-eyes condition, the eyes were occluded while the rest of the image remained visible. Participants were asked to determine whether the depicted individual was thinking, listening, or tapping. Results showed that participants correctly identified the depicted individuals' cognitive state above chance-level. The effect was larger in the no-mask and eyes-only conditions but was attenuated in the no-eyes condition. In Experiment 2, we examined the spatial characteristics of this effect. Individuals were filmed while performing goal-directed saccades toward nine distinct locations. Participants (N=60) who viewed these videos tended to interpret left and right upward saccades with higher eccentricity as indicators of thinking. Taken together, these studies suggest that GAs with certain characteristics function as social signals indicative of effortful cognitive processing. Such signaling enables interlocutors to "read the mind" of others, thereby enhancing nonverbal communication. By integrating cognitive paradigms with ecologically valid social stimuli, this research underscores the important, yet rarely explored, link between social attention and oculomotion.

Acknowledgements: This study was funded by ISF grant 1960/19 to S.Y-G and by Minducate scholarship to A.Z