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Category: Communication

Description: Humans often show reduced social attention in real situations, a finding rarely reported in controlled laboratory studies. Virtual reality is supposed to allow ecologically valid and at the same time highly controlled experiments. This study aimed to provide further insights into the usage of virtual reality and the role of interactions for social attention. We chose five public places in the city of Würzburg and measured eye movements of 44 participants for 30 seconds at each location twice: Once in a real environment with mobile eye tracking glasses and once in a virtual environment playing a spherical video of the location in an HMD with an integrated eye tracker. As hypothesized, participants demonstrated reduced social attention with less fixations on passengers in real environments (M = 7%, CI = [5%, 9%]) as compared to virtual environments (M = 30%, CI = [28%, 32%]). This is in line with earlier studies showing social avoidance in interactive situations. Furthermore, we observed more consistent fixation patterns in virtual environments. These findings highlight that the potential for social interactions and an adherence to social norms are essential modulators of viewing behavior in social situations and cannot be easily simulated in laboratory contexts. However, spherical videos might be helpful for supplementing the range of methods in social cognition research and other fields. Preregistration, data and analysis scripts are available at https://osf.io/hktdu/.