Research On The Implicit Learning Of The Regularity Of Gaze Cues

People usually acquire knowledge or regularities solely through being exposed to stimuli and apply them in a way that could not consciously know or verbalize what has been learnt. This form of learning is known as implicit learning. During social interactions, people’s eye gazes convey a wealth of visual information about their directions of attention toward targets. This visual information is not as meaningless as artificial grammar created by Reber (1967), and not as simple as serial reaction time proposed by Nissen and Bullermer (1987). Hence, the classic paradigms of implicit learning are not suitable for gaze cues study. Actually people can adjust their behaviors (searching a target) efficiently according to other’s gaze cues. The reason might be that people have abilities to acquire the invariant structures or regularities hidden in others’gaze cues though the structures or regularities of gaze cues are complicated. Therefore, the paper focus on the learning effect of the regularities of gaze cues in visual scenes with or without awareness.The significant learning effect was found in experiment1. Participants had abilities to acquire implicitly or explicitly the associations between directions of gaze cues and target locations in the visual background during the course of visual searching and forced choice testing.After that, the author investigated the factors which influence on the learning effect of regularities of gaze cues, such as item numbers on the layout (experiment2), the ratios (experiment3) and the locations (experiment4) of eye gazes which are looking at the target. The results found participants could acquire the associations between directions of gaze cues and target locations implicitly or explicitly on the layout of8,12or16items; they learned the regularities of gaze cues implicitly when the gaze cues ratio was73%(high gaze cues ratio) but failed when the gaze cues ratio was27%(low gaze cues ratio); on the condition of low gaze cues ratio, they could learn the regularities of gaze cues with or without awareness only when the locations of eye gazes which are looking at the target were on the center of the layout.