Abstract
The human face and gaze direction elicit explicit attention in terms of the fixations that guide selective attention to visual information. We examine this possibility by tracking eye movements while participants twice viewed a video of a magic trick and demonstrate that participants fixate on the magician's face. During the first viewing, participant eye movements largely followed the objects that the magician had previously attended to. These results indicate that one's own fixations substantially guide the fixations of others. Even during the second viewing, when participants knew what to expect, they continued to be strongly influenced by the magician's gaze direction. This tendency was also observed even in the absence of explicit information concerning the magician's gaze direction due to wearing a mask. However, this bias gradually declined as the video continued. Accordingly, we argue that, when individuals must accurately infer the other person's intention to comprehend some video content, prior viewings are largely ineffectual in attenuating the other people's impact on controlling own fixation.
