Perceiving crowd attention: Ensemble perception of a crowd’s gaze

摘要

Each time we encounter a person, we gather a wealth of socio-visual cues to guide our behavior. Intriguingly, social information is most effective in directing behavior when it is perceived in crowds. For example, the shared gaze of a crowd is more likely to direct attention than an individual’s gaze. Are we equipped with mechanisms to perceive a crowd’s gaze as an ensemble? Here, we provide the first evidence that the visual system extracts a summary representation of a crowd’s attention; people rapidly pooled information from multiple individuals to perceive the direction of a crowd’s collective gaze. This pooling occurred in high-level stages of visual processing, with gaze perceived as a global-level combination of information from head and pupil rotation. These findings reveal an important and efficient mechanism for assessing crowd gaze, which could underlie our ability to perceive group intentions, orchestrate joint attention, and guide behavior.