Submit a Manuscript to the Journal
Visual Cognition
For a Special Issue on
Eye-Tracking Approaches to Social Cognition
Manuscript deadline
Special Issue Editor(s)
Veronica Dudarev,
University of British Columbia
[email protected]
Dana Hayward,
University of Alberta
[email protected]
Basil Wahn,
Technische Universität Berlin
[email protected]
Francesca Capozzi,
Université du Québec à Montréal
[email protected]
Eye-Tracking Approaches to Social Cognition
Social cognition research gained a lot of insight from the application of eye-tracking. The most iconic result from Yarbus (1967) is that in free viewing of a face, some regions (eyes and mouth) are fixated more than others. Since then, eye-tracking has been widely used to study social perception of static images presented on a screen and has provided powerful insights that often constitute dedicated chapters in textbooks (e.g., Kawakami, Meyers & Fang, 2024).
More recently, mobile eye-trackers and emphasis on ecological validity of the experimental designs made it possible to capture eye movements in dynamic social interactions, putting previous laboratory findings to a critical test (Hayward et al., 2017; Ristic & Capozzi, 2022; Wahn & Schmitz, 2022) and shifting the research focus from encoding function of the gaze to its communicative function and the balance between the two (Dudarev et al., 2022; Risko et al., 2016). This special issue aims to provide a snapshot of the current state of the field by showcasing research that applies both established and emerging eye-tracking technologies—including, but not limited to, mobile eye-tracking— thereby highlighting key questions in social cognition that are being addressed using eye-tracking methods.
Potential topics include (but are not limited to):
- Attention distribution to social stimuli, static or moving;
- Attention to social stimuli in passive viewing or while engaged in a task;
- Eye-tracking during joint action / action coordination tasks;
- Communicative function of gaze during interactions or in the presence of other people, actual or implied;
- Gaze following in computerized or interactive tasks;
- Methodologies and techniques for mobile eye-tracking in social settings.
Submission Instructions
Full papers should be submitted by November 1st 2026. In the cover letter, please elaborate on relevance of the paper for the special issue.
References
Dudarev, V., Liu, M., & Kingstone, A. (2022). De-evolving human eyes: The effect of eye camouflage on human attention. Cognition, 225, 105136.
Hayward, D. A., Voorhies, W., Morris, J. L., Capozzi, F., & Ristic, J. (2017). Staring reality in the face: A comparison of social attention across laboratory and real world measures suggests little common ground. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 71(3), 212.
Kawakami, K., Meyers, C., & Fang, X. (2024). 5 Social Cognition, Attention, and Eye Tracking. Carlston, Donal; Hugenberg, Kurt; Johnson, Kerri (Hg.): The Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition, 2(2), 143-170.
Risko, E. F., Richardson, D. C., & Kingstone, A. (2016). Breaking the fourth wall of cognitive science: Real-world social attention and the dual function of gaze. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(1), 70-74.
Ristic, J., & Capozzi, F. (2022). Mechanisms for individual, group-based and crowd-based attention to social information. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(12), 721-732.
Wahn, B., & Schmitz, L. (2023). Labor division in collaborative visual search: a review. Psychological Research, 87(5), 1323-1333.
Yarbus, A. L. (1967). Eye movements during perception of complex objects. In Eye movements and vision (pp. 171-211). Boston, MA: Springer US.