ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Other people's gaze encoded as implied motion in the human brain.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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14 citing papers in PubMed, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Motion aftereffects from viewing another's gaze are restricted to the line of sight.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Monitoring Attention in Self and Others.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Cortical networks involved in judging the attention of others.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
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- A motion aftereffect from viewing other people's gaze.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- A random-object-kinematogram plugin for web-based research: implementing oriented objects enables varying coherence levels and stimulus congruency levels.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- A conceptual framework for consciousness.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Attention, awareness, and the right temporoparietal junction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Article
- Visual motion assists in social cognition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Observational
- Reply to Görner et al.: Encoding gaze as implied motion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Does the brain encode the gaze of others as beams emitted by their eyes?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Other people's gaze encoded as implied motion in the human brain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Keeping track of other people's gaze is an essential task in social cognition and key for successfully reading other people's intentions and beliefs (theory of mind). Recent behavioral evidence suggests that we construct an implicit model of other people's gaze, which may incorporate physically incoherent attributes such as a construct of force-carrying beams that emanate from the eyes. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and multivoxel pattern analysis to test the prediction that the brain encodes gaze as implied motion streaming from an agent toward a gazed-upon object. We found that a classifier, trained to discriminate the direction of visual motion, significantly decoded the gaze direction in static images depicting a sighted face, but not a blindfolded one, from brain activity patterns in the human motion-sensitive middle temporal complex (MT+) and temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). Our results demonstrate a link between the visual motion system and social brain mechanisms, in which the TPJ, a key node in theory of mind, works in concert with MT+ to encode gaze as implied motion. This model may be a fundamental aspect of social cognition that allows us to efficiently connect agents with the objects of their attention. It is as if the brain draws a quick visual sketch with moving arrows to help keep track of who is attending to what. This implicit, fluid-flow model of other people's gaze may help explain culturally universal myths about the mind as an energy-like, flowing essence.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.