Implicit model of other people’s visual attention as an invisible beam

I so wish I hadn't read this.. My eyeballs are itching

I think it's really interesting how when we learn new things (such as this lesson about how the eye works) we often only learn them "halfway." E.g., obviously, you're not blind, and you see as far as you like- but your old sense of how sight works involved contact, and your new concept didn't fully rid you of the notion that contact was a limiting factor. Only because these two contradictory notions could coexist in your mind did you feel "blind."

Similarly, I've had people tell me that reading about the "microbiome" is really distressing, since afterwards they feel like they have some alien infestation in their bodies- as though they were full of bugs. On one level they learned a new thing, that healthy human bodies contain lots of various microorganisms, but some part of their psyche still maintained that any such creatures must be pathological. Their obvious health doesn't make them feel like microbiome theory is false, and nor does it fully convince them that their microbiome is benign.

There's probably a lot of more subtle examples of this, and it probably goes a long way to explain why so many people find science to be distressing or depressing.

I think what you did is rolled back a layer of abstraction your brain created for you. Sure, your eyeballs are high-sampling-frequency tongues swimming in a sea of light. But the brain processes those raw sensory readings, fuses them with a bunch of other things, and presents it as a view of the world, and then to simplify things, it tells itself that this is the world.

I'm actually super-interested in ways of building those layers of abstractions. Consider tool use. If you've used any tool a lot, you know the feeling of it becoming an extension of yourself. Proficient drivers don't think about moving the keyboard or turning the wheels, they just sort of are the car and will themselves to move where they want to go. As I type this comment, I don't think about my fingers pounding on the keyboard, I just will the words to appear on screen. The brain is good at papering over the mechanics of interacting with the world, and I think it's entirely feasible to start incorporating new senses if our devices can be designed around this purpose, instead of relying on explicitly displaying data for our eyes.

Classic example of using logical mind to become less effective as a human being: to bring the intellect into an area which already works well subconsciously and try to do it's job for it using thinking. :)

The solution is to just trust your eyes and vision (and by extension, trust the universe at large, if you extend this into the spiritual realm): whatever the exact mechanism of the eyes is, they obviously work well for you. It doesn't make sense to take one small aspect of it (low number of lightbuds) and read too much into it, when its shortcomings are easily abstracted away by for example innate intelligence that scans the environment using those few bulbs, to produce a high-megapixel internal representation which will work well enough! Look at the big picture.

If the images in the article are at scale, the height of the rectangle is 1/8 of the width of the image, so if we assume that it is as width as posible with a screen of ~1200 pixels, then the height of the rectangle is ~200 pixels.

Also, 1 degree = pi/180 ~=1/60 radians. The difference they are measuring is approximately 1/2 degree. So with a height of 200 the change of 1/2 degree is approximately 2 pixels. [In case it is not obvious, I'm making a lot of assumptions and approximation.]

The text explain the size of the groups: 175 (online), 25, 15, 15. [I'm not sure if this numbers are counted before or after eliminating the subjects that didn't understand the task.]

Looking at the graph my objection is that the three results where the "face" was looking at the rectangle are too consistent. They are .64±.23, .67±.30 and .63±.26. The difference in the three averages is only .04, but the standard deviation is like .25 in each case. And with 15 subjects you don't reduce the deviation of the average too much, so these values look fishy.

The other five results look more natural. The standard deviation is something like .20 or .30, and they are scattered randomly in a range of a similar width.

Are they reporting all the experiments they made, or they made a lot of experiments and cherrypicked four of them?

Also, in the graphic "The asterisk indicates D significantly greater than 0, P < 0.05." not that the two measurements have a difference that is statistically significantly. In particular in the third graph the error bars are too close to each other.

You look where you want to go -- same with driving a car or bike. If you look elsewhere too long you'll run into something/someone.

What is really noticeable is some people look at the floor in front of them. These stand out in an oncoming crowd because they never flow around obstacles in their path, they walk towards them and turn 0-4 m before collision.

The reason this works is that the oncoming person thinks you have not seem them. If someone is coming directly towards you and you think you have seen them before they have seen you, it makes sense that you should move out of their way rather than wait for them to eventually notice you. Also, when you do move, you are guaranteed that they will not move in the same direction (because they would need a little extra time to spot you and perform the evasive maneuver).

I don't think this observation necessarily supports the extramission theory of vision described in the study though. You could achieve exactly the same result by looking at your feet, coving your eyes or wearing a blindfold; anyone coming towards you is still going to get out of your way.

A relative of mine had asked their psychologist about them feeling that they kept dodging and being stuck by people while walking in crowded areas, and they were recommended to look up at a point above the oncoming people, in the direction you are heading, and that after trying it people were suddenly getting out of their way when they walk.

I can't upvote this enough. I learned that trick on this very site long ago and it works wonders. I just stare straight ahead past the crowd and they part like the Red Sea.

The last leg of my commute has me walking against the massive flow of people from a rail station so it's served me very well.

I saw a study a few years back (not necessarily a rigorous one) in which a surprisingly high proportion of the public have this mechanism as how the eye worked. But, IIRC, had no response to the "so why can't we see as well in the dark".

I clicked expecting this comment.

There's also the following from the Gospel of Thomas (verse 26):

Jesus said, "You see the sliver in your friend's eye, but you don't see the timber in your own eye. When you take the timber out of your own eye, then you will see well enough to remove the sliver from your friend's eye."

is the assertion here that looking directly is an active threat?

> That is, asserting dominance via staring at others is something we’re born with, and for good reason: our ancestors’ survival hinged on this when being confronted with someone bigger/stronger.

This explanation is circular. Trying to stare down an enemy who doesn't already care about staring-as-dominance is a losing strategy; they'll just attack you. It doesn't explain how staring-as-dominance came about.

Zizek's a Lacanian. Lacan has a very rich theory of the Gaze.

Unscientific, but still very rich.

From that WP page: “Winer et al. (2002) have found evidence that as many as 50% of adults believe in emission theory,” sourced from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12094435?dopt=Abstract

That kinda sounds like raytracing.

Also from ancient India:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prana

Which brings up the interesting idea that qi may be phenomenologically "real", insomuch as it's something our brains percieve, even if it has no basis in physical "reality".

The fovea requires that our eyes move constantly for maximum acuity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis

Humans are extremely good at analysing the focus of human-like eyes (where a person/animal/robot is looking). This says nothing about any internal theory of how vision works -- a 2yo can tell where one is looking, he has no explicit theory of vision-(and-mind). It's mechanistic, not perceptual.

that's probably a more logical explanation than "people envision an imaginary beam of force". First, they 'd have to control for that by including people who had no cultural knowledge of a laser beam.

I think it's more likely to be a component of bootstrapping intelligence when you're a baby, by having having built-in algorithms telling you what those around you are looking at.

I've seen that people are quite good at tracking the gaze of others for mating purposes. Who is looking at whom and how they are looking is all quite interesting and informative.

You are definitely right. But remember that 3D modeling circuitry have evolved a long time ago, because it arises from non-visual senses. This means localization of auditory events in space. So say these “beams” are already coming out of peoples —- no, not even people’s, apes — ears to listen for something, like a noise in the jungle. Then when these apes develop something key to detect the human voice, like the superior temporal sulcus, suddenly all our interest is in what sounds come out of other psople’s mouths, so our ear beams go to their mouths instead of, say, looking all around the hanitat, the room, the jungle, whatever it is, for something dangerous that will eat it. I think it’s plausible.

Would you mind explaining why you think explanations in the style of evolutionary biology are bullshit ?

I find your comment very enlightening and I sense some kind of self-irony that tickles my curiosity about your views. I bet you have some insightful thoughts about explanations coming from evolutionary biology and how one should take them, and I'd would be very interested in hearing them.

The linked paper says that the empirical accuracy of this feeling was disproven over 100 years ago:

> One of the most common extramission beliefs is that people can “feel” someone else’s gaze as a pressure or heat on the skin. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Titchener (14) and Coover (15) showed that, although people may believe in eye beams, no such beams exist; people cannot actually detect the gaze of another in the absence of specific sensory information.

> 14 Titchener EB (1898) The feeling of being stared at. Science 8:895–897.

> 15 Coover JE (1913) The feeling of being stared at. Am J Psychol 24:570–575.

Have you come across later studies that suggest it does have a statistically verifiable reality?

Edit: debate about this topic further down in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18852698

So what's the approximate percentage of the times that people can tell, vs the times when they can't or are mistaken?

Ever noticed how especially in groups (or any group/public setting) when attention is diverted away from them people often seem to start shifting their pose or doing something like moving their fingers, hands or legs? I wonder how deliberate those movements and actions are.

> Given how frequently people can tell when someone is looking at them from behind

I'm going to say "exactly the same as random chance".

How do you control for just happening to look when someone else is happening to look, or worse, attracting looks when you check for someone looking?

Here's a common interaction, which would create that feeling without anything at all underlying it:

1. A person is sitting at a table, with me sitting at a table behind them -- both of us facing the same way, ie, me facing their back.

2. I was staring a few feet to the side of the person -- zoning out in space, and not looking at anything besides the wall pattern.

3. That person has a transient feeling someone is watching, and turns to look.

4. The motion of their head turning causes me to leap to alert, as there's suddenly motion in my peripheral vision -- I move my eyes to focus on the motion, and resolve what it is.

5. We make eye contact, validating their initial belief.

6. The other person has taken a step to condition themselves, similar to Skinner's dancing pigeons. Repeating this interaction over decades leaves them believing in a sense they don't actually possess.

Add in some bias in what people remember, eg the times they make eye contact instead of the many times no one was looking, and it's a powerful way to end up confused about the world.

I'm not sure how you'd suss this one out without an extra interaction which necessarily confounds the results (eg, an extra observer -- but since we're testing observer effects, that's messy and a half).

People can feel "stared at" over a telephone call, so I'm not sure what that's supposed to show about eye beams.

But importantly, it's not an assumption that eyes don't emit a force of a hundredth of a newton. We have tested it, and you can test it yourself by glancing at a piece of paper. That nonexistent pushing force is what the paper is about, not feelings of being stared at.