
Implicit model of other people’s visual attention as an invisible beam - pseudolus
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/1/328.long
======
jcims
Even though I had a very good understanding of the anatomy of the eye and
largely how vision works, my internal concept of vision was still kind of like
what is described in the title.

Then I realized your retinas are more like a specialized tongue covered with
lightbuds, and my sense of vision changed dramatically. I suddenly had a sense
of blindness, that I could see only as far as the tips of the rods and cones
in my eye, and everything beyond that was just lining up the photons so they
made sense when they arrived.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

~~~
jfries
This is very interesting.

I remember reading about pilots placing an electrode on the tongue and
eventually learning to intuitively feel what the external sensor was telling
them.

Or another one about a person wearing a belt which always vibrated in the spot
facing north. This helped them navigate cities more efficiently after getting
accustomed to the vibrations.

Do you have other examples?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Those were the exact two I have on my mind. I've actually started building an
ankle bracelet for the north-sense to test it out on myself.

People also reported getting a feel for strong EM fields in their surroundings
after implanting a small magnet in a finger.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
You might have come across this, or similar, images before (random image
search link, no affiliation):

[https://www.themystica.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/03/Homunc...](https://www.themystica.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/03/Homunculus.gif)

This is a proportional representation of touch-sense nerve density in the
skin.

Trade-offs though hey. All the highest density areas are probably also the
least convenient location for augmented-synesthesia touch-sense devices.

~~~
ajuc
I'm pretty sure they missed one spot :)

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Yes, I believe you’re right. That image is _very_ G rated.

------
jstanley
I remain skeptical. The effect size here is really small.

They presented subjects with an image of a rectangle sitting on a table with a
human face either looking at it or not looking at it, from either the left or
the right, and then asked them to work out what angle the rectangle would need
to be tilted at to be perfectly balanced on one point. The idea being that if
people model vision as a force beam emitted from the eyes, then people will
assume that that force needs to be countered by leaning the rectangle slightly
towards the eyes.

The difference between a face looking at it or not looking at it was less than
1 degree of rotation[0]. They also don't say how many pixels tall the
rectangle was. For all we know it might only be 1 pixel different in the
position at the top.

[0]
[https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/1/328/F2.large.jpg](https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/1/328/F2.large.jpg)

~~~
gus_massa
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.

------
dorkwood
I always used to find it difficult to walk through a crowd of oncoming people.
I'd inevitably get caught in a "dance" with somebody as we tried to figure out
which way the other person was trying to go.

My problems were greatly alleviated once I figured out this one weird trick
for navigating through pedestrians: stare a path through the crowd. People
will subconsciously move out of your way. It's as if they pay more attention
to your eyes than the actual direction your body is moving.

~~~
spuz
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.

~~~
12298765
Except that this technique has worked for me after I look at a person too. We
make eye contact, then I look to their right and they automatically pass on my
left. I think it's more subconscious than you're making it out to be.

~~~
chillacy
I used this technique to cross the street in Vietnam, oncoming motorcycles
look where they’re going, and they trust that you will too. Looking at an
oncoming motorcycle just results in both of you coming to a stop. Guess the
ski instructors were right: you go where you look.

------
GorgeRonde
> In the fifth century BC, Empedocles postulated that everything was composed
> of four elements; fire, air, earth and water. He believed that Aphrodite
> made the human eye out of the four elements and that she lit the fire in the
> eye which shone out from the eye making sight possible. If this were true,
> then one could see during the night just as well as during the day, so
> Empedocles postulated an interaction between rays from the eyes and rays
> from a source such as the sun.

Source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#Historical_theories_abou...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#Historical_theories_about_light,_in_chronological_order)

P.S. : I really find it fascinating that, provided we could bring these
ancient thinkers to our times and teach them the discoveries science has made
since they died, they would still hold their initial view in some way. This is
obvious with what modern physics calls 'atom' (etymologically: 'not
divisible'), and I could see Empedocle saying "At least, I was not totally off
the tracks when it comes to what sight is psychologically".

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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".

------
ph0rque
"Turn away your eyes from me, for they overwhelm me" \-- Song of Solomon 6:5

~~~
omarchowdhury
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."

~~~
rmdashrfstar
I don't understand what the meaning of this verse is, could you explain what
is meant by timber and silver and the relation to the eyes?

~~~
schoen
You're misreading "sliver" as "silver" here. Some people have also translated
these as "mote" and "beam".

The idea is something like that people are judging others with harsh standards
that they can't apply to themselves, so they will notice or point out a very
tiny problem related to another person, but not notice or point out a big
problem related to themselves. It's a metaphor about having objects of
different sizes stuck in one's eye and then a different activation threshold,
so to speak, for acting on it depending on whose eye it is. This is akin to
several kinds of cognitive bias.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
serving_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias)

Edit: original context in Matthew:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_and_the_Beam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_and_the_Beam)

The previous commenter mentioned that this saying appears in the Gospel of
Thomas but it's much better known in this form from the Gospel of Matthew,
which is considered canonical in Christianity.

------
aaaaaaaaaab
I’d say this is because the concept of a “stare down” is instictive to us
primates (or even mammals in general). 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. That’s why you look down when you’re anxious or ashamed.
Canines and felines do the same.

So it’s just natural that people subconsciously transfer this dominance-via-
staring to inanimate objects as well, because it comes from a very ancient
mammalian instinct.

~~~
rntz
> 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.

~~~
NotAnEconomist
Staring is a precursor to attacks; animals which responded to other animals
getting ready to attack them by posturing as if they were ready to
counterattack avoided many fights.

Over time, this interaction was offloaded into specialized hardware analyzing
gaze -- the one more interested in fighting was the one who stared longer, and
that interaction became associated with dominance in social groups.

This was accelerated as the system became more advanced, and more gestures
could be recognized as implicit confrontations (and their resolutions).

------
cantthinkofone
>Even though eye beams do not exist in reality, and even though most people do
not intellectually believe in them, they may exist as a part of the rich,
implicit social model that we naturally apply to seeing agents.

It makes sense that people would attempt to reconstruct a model or theory of
mind from scant cues based on other's gazes. In many contexts, such as
encountering strangers, you don't have anything else to work with, and so the
importance is on leveraging what you can.

It's also something that even if eye beams or extramissons have no empirical
reality, the concept of them can still be utilized in representations of
other's minds. It reminds me of Zizek's interest in the "reality of the
virtual" that is, even things that aren't empirically real but are merely
conceived can have real world impacts.

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

Unscientific, but still very rich.

------
kurosawa
Reminds me of old-school emission/extramission theories
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_theory_(vision)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_theory_\(vision\))

~~~
Cthulhu_
That kinda sounds like raytracing.

~~~
samatman
It is raytracing!

Raytracing demonstrates that, although our physics and physiology work on
raycasting, the 'visual ray' theory could be correct in some other
hypothetical world.

------
pndd90
This phenomenon was known as one of manifestations of 'qi', life force to the
ancient chinese. Specifically, the form that can be better aligned with what
can be described as 'intent'.

~~~
zenkat
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".

~~~
samatman
I find qi phenomenologically real, whatever basis it might have.

Indeed, if it wasn't, it's hard to imagine how the concept would have been
invented, let alone repeatedly in different cultures.

------
aasasd
Alright, I'm generally sorta amused by those ideas popping up in the brain
that minuscule interactions are somehow vaguely important, like the “don't
step on cracks”―though I keep wondering if they're just remnants of child's
imagination or more of a symptom of some peculiarity.

But this one takes the cake.

Until now, Piotr Kamler's surrealistic otherworldly cartoons were the closest
thing (for me) to these ideas of the brain that the world functions by
different laws―animations like ‘Chronopolis’ and ‘The Ephemeral Mission’:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me5UUK37Vc4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me5UUK37Vc4)

------
PavlikPaja
Why would you imagine a beam, when your field of view is over 180°?

~~~
lamename
The fovea requires that our eyes move constantly for maximum acuity

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis)

~~~
PavlikPaja
I'm not sure what you mean, I don't stop seeing when I stare at something.

Yes, the sharpness obviously drops away from your central vision, yet you can
still see with FOV well over 180°. (Not sure if it's actually 190°, so I
edited my question)

~~~
TeMPOraL
The sharpness drops away really fast, so you can really imagine the actual
focused FOV as a narrow beam when projected. Also, you don't really just
"stare" at something, unless it's far away. For objects of interest that are
larger than 1-2 degrees in your FOV, your eyes will have to move a lot, really
fast, to continuously scan it. You don't notice your own eyes moving, though.
See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade).

(Also, what you "see" is in large parts made up by fusing the "real" visual
input with knowledge and expectations you have in your head.)

~~~
PavlikPaja
Thank you for your concerns, but I'm pretty sure I can see for real, I'm not
imagining anything.

~~~
ben_w
Unless you have a wonderful mutation, your colour perception in almost all of
your peripheral vision is imaginary.

As is mine.

I have the impression you took the other post personally when it’s about all
humans.

~~~
PavlikPaja
It indeed seems I have much better peripheral vision than most people, so you
might be right. As I wrote in the other post, I have tested that I can
definitely see color in my peripheral vision.

~~~
ben_w
Out of interest, what was your test?

~~~
PavlikPaja
Random color generator. The precision goes down on the far periphery, (the
colors usually look more saturated than they are), but the basic color is
right. In near-mid periphery (~45°), the colors seem normal.

~~~
ben_w
Good work. Have you included randomised brightness to avoid accidentally
learning the difference between what the computer thinks is constant
brightness and what your eyes respond to constantly? (Such as “green seems
brighter than red”)?

~~~
PavlikPaja
It was just random RGB colors. I didn't train for it and I doubt it's possible
to learn anyway.

~~~
ben_w
Good work.

If it had been HSV(rand, 1, 1), which you didn’t do, I would anticipate
accidentally learning to map subjective brightness to hue. But you avoided
that entirely, so no matter :)

------
xkgt
The YANSS podcast (you are not that smart) discussed the same phenomena in
2015. On the whole, a pretty interesting podcast.

[https://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/03/26/yanss-
podcast-046-la...](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/03/26/yanss-
podcast-046-laser-eyes-and-reptilian-false-flags/)

------
kseistrup
Cats perceive our eyes in the same way: they invariably position themselves at
the focus of our eyes' attention beams.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

------
21
While due to the overall reproducibility crisis in psychology I wouldn't put
one dollar on this, it's would make some sense.

A person (or a dog) could at any moment start pushing/punching/biting in the
direction it is looking at, so it's important to keep track of. In a sense,
visual attention predates later force.

~~~
monocasa
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.

~~~
stcredzero
We already know that wolves and dogs use gaze tracking for communication and
cooperation during hunting.

------
mieses
These people could explain why an apple falls from a tree using a
psychological study.

------
saulrh
...So, if we're going to put on our evolutionary biology (AKA bullshit) hats,
this allows your brain to abuse its 3d modeling circuitry (which is
_incredibly_ advanced) to figure out what people are looking at. I bet that
"let's put a tiny force in and see what it pushes on" was way easier and
higher-quality than some special thing dedicated solely to tracking people's
attention. It's an amazing hack.

~~~
GorgeRonde
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.

~~~
saulrh
I think that I wrote that comment a bit late at night and was thinking about
evolutionary psychology, so I'll offer an apology to the evolutionary
biologists in the audience. Sorry. :/

The majority of evolutionary biology is good hard science. The knowledge we
gain from studying historical trajectories through genome-space has _immense_
real-world value. As a concrete example, inspecting historical speciation
events allows us to tighten the bounds we have on various constants in the
dynamics that govern genetic change when implemented using Earth-pattern
biochemistry (CGAT DNA etc), and that knowledge in turn helps us reduce bias
and disentangle causes from correlations when we're trying to nail down
genetic causes of disease.

There is a segment of evolutionary biology which is... not such good science.
This is where you get attempts to explain specific high-level features of
biology or human behavior using equally specific features in historical
environments. Things like "Women are better at seeing colors because it was
their job to look for fruit when we were hunter-gatherers." Works in this
domain, if they pretend to have an underlying theory at all, will offer
something vague and nonspecific that reveals no bigger picture or more general
principle, or will offer an underlying theory that totally fails to
generalize. Falsifiable hypotheses or useful predictions can be few and far
between. You can't use it to reduce error in any experiment nor to improve the
efficiency of any tool or product. It is, in short, bullshit.

I put my comment above closer to the bullshit end of the spectrum basically
because I took some inappropriate shortcuts, I think because I was trying to
not be bored or boring. Most of the issue was that I anthropomorphized
evolution to assign intent and by attempted to present a "why" that implies
that any alternatives were considered or chosen between. That kind of
thinking, in the context of evolutionary biology, is playing with fire. I'll
hand an explanation of that off to an essay that I think can explain it better
than I possibly could: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLRogvJLPPg6Mrvg4/an-
alien-g...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLRogvJLPPg6Mrvg4/an-alien-god)

------
zummi
Isn’t this just Galen’s platonic extromissive vision? The vision of “Eros”?

------
oth001
"Where attention goes, energy flows"

------
pcmaffey
Given how frequently people can tell when someone is looking at them from
behind or at a distance, the book on attention as a material force is anything
but closed.

~~~
jstanley
> 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".

~~~
beaconstudios
I'm more inclined to believe that our senses are especially on the lookout for
attacks from behind, so if we catch subtle cues that someone or something is
behind us that we weren't previously aware of (subtle sounds, air
disturbances, the diversion of other people's eyes to look at it) we're more
likely to turn around to see what it is. Some of the time, the person we
sensed behind us is looking at us, but we disproportionately remember those
times because it feels more weird and memorable.

------
laretluval
I'll wait for the registered replication before assimilating this into my
model of reality.

------
mcguire
The Scott Summers model?

------
taxicabjesus
> Since the eyes obviously do not really extrude a beam of energy, this view
> is typically dismissed by science.

If you start with an assumption, the end result will probably be compatible
with the assumption.

Rupert Sheldrake wrote a book titled _The Sense of Being Stared At_ [0]. I
recently found a copy at a thrift store (it was on my stack of books that I've
yet to read). Dr. Sheldrake does not adopt materialist science's assumptions.

Perhaps the eyes do not exactly emit invisible energy, but something is
probably happening that deserves to be investigated.

Here's a quote from Rupert Sheldrake's book (pg. 125):

    
    
      [anecdote of girl's experience of catching 
      creeper following her]
      
      In frightening situations such as this, the 
      sense of being stared at is particularly 
      memorable. But most people have experienced 
      it for themselves, usually in less dramatic 
      circumstances. In my own surveys of adults 
      in Europe and in the United States, 70 to 
      90 percent said they had sensed when they 
      were being looked at from behind. Surveys 
      by other researchers have given similar 
      results. Gerald Winer and his colleagues in 
      the Psychology Department of Ohio State 
      University have found that these 
      experiences are even commoner among 
      children than adults. Ninety-four percent 
      of sixth-grade schoolchildren (aged eleven 
      and twelve) answered yest to the question, 
      "do you ever feel that someone is staring 
      at you without actually seeing them look at 
      you?" So did 89 percent of college 
      students.
      
      The sense of being stared is often alluded 
      to in short stories and novels. "His eyes 
      bored into the back of her neck" is a 
      cliche of popular fiction. Here is an 
      example from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the 
      creator of Sherlock Holmes: [...]
    

> We proposed (9) that a simplified model of vision may be related to a belief
> that is _extraordinarily persistent_ across human cultures: the belief that
> the eyes emit an invisible energy. (emphasis added)

[edit: perhaps the belief is persistent because there's something to it.]
Simplified models are one thing. Simplistic models are non-helpful.

Discussion question: In my experience, I've noticed a few times when I've been
stared at, and I've stared at people who've spontaneously looked right at me.
Do you have any memorable experiences of this phenomenon?

Perhaps people are most likely to notice they're being stared at when the
starer is the opposite gender?

I guess I'm going to have to read Dr. Sheldrake's book.

[0] [https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/the-
sens...](https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/the-sense-of-
being-stared-at-and-other-unexplained-powers-of-human-minds)

~~~
NotAnEconomist
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).

~~~
taxicabjesus
> 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?

I'm sure you could figure out an experimental protocol. The book I referenced,
_The Sense of Being Stared At_ , presumably applies mathematics and statistics
to the experiments. But I haven't read it, and I don't care enough at the
present time to really dig into the text and respond to your whole comment.

Chapter 11 is titled "Experiments on the sense of being stared at". Page 168
begins the discussion of Titchener and Coover's papers. The present PNAS
paper's authors say these papers supposedly "showed that [...] people cannot
actually detect the gaze of another in the absence of specific sensory
information" [quote from the submission].

Sheldrake says, "Titchener's paper was very influential, and was widely cited
by skeptics for more than 100 years, even though he said nothing about the
actual experiments except that they were negative." Coover's paper was
discussed a bit, then "By reinforcing Tichener's negative conclusions,
Coover's work seemed to put an end to the matter from a scientific point of
view. His paper was published in 1913."

Someone supposedly re-did Coover's experiment in 1939, and found the results
statistically significant.

If you're actually interested in the subject, the ebook version of Sheldrake's
book is $12 or so. Otherwise you're just fighting with a straw man [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man)

