Guiding gaze via gaze: Effect anticipation during intentional saccadic gaze leading

Our actions often evoke foreseeable behavioral responses in others. For instance, fixating an object can trigger another person to look toward the same location. Ideomotor frameworks assume that one's own actions are initiated by anticipating this evoked behavior of another person. However, in gaze leading situations, a partner’s gaze following is initially discernible only peripherally, raising the question of whether corresponding anticipations still affect the gaze leader’s eye movements. This potentially important mechanism underlying gaze interaction has not yet been explicitly examined. We conducted two experiments using a novel adaptation of the response-effect compatibility (REC) paradigm. Within a card-game cheating scenario, participants performed a saccade to one of two target objects (card decks). Contingent upon this saccade, an on-screen face foreseeably looked to the same object (compatible) or to the opposite side (incompatible), a perceptual consequence of the participant’s saccade that was initially only detectable in peripheral vision. Crucially, participants initiated saccades significantly faster in the compatible compared to the incompatible condition, but only in an experimental setting without additional constraints preventing direct fixation of the action effect. This suggests that participants anticipated their (virtual) partner’s gaze responses, which in turn either facilitated or hampered the production of their own eye movements. This finding aligns with the idea that basic ideomotor processes also underlie social gaze leading/following scenarios. Consistent with previous REC studies in the non-social domain, the results also indicate that the effect is sensitive to specific experimental settings and may disappear when cognitive demands are too high or when the interaction situation is less realistic.