The study investigated how affective contextual factors modulate the oculomotor temporal pattern of joint attention. The emotional context included the object’s affective meaning (the image's emotionality), cued by gaze, and, for the person providing the gaze cue, facial expression. The oculomotor temporal pattern of joint attention was examined from orientation through engagement to attention disengagement. The study involved 179 participants in two eye-tracking experiments.
The dataset contains measurement results for the independent variables: Image's Emotionality (fear, happiness, neutral) and Gaze-Cue Congruency with the Location of the Image (congruent, incongruent, and control condition – direct gaze), Facial Expression (fear, happiness, neutral) for the indicators of each of the four dependent variables: Attentional orientation, Early Attentional Engagement, Total Attentional Engagement, Attentional Disengagement.
The first dependent variable, attentional orientation, was operationalized using two indicators: the Probability of the First Fixation (PFF) on an Area of Interest (AOI) and the Latency of the First Saccade (LFS) to an AOI. PFF was defined as the ratio of the number of first fixations occurring on a particular AOI to the total number of possible first fixations on that AOI. LFS was defined as the time required to initiate the saccade leading to the first fixation on an AOI. This measure does not include saccade duration.
The second dependent variable, early attentional engagement, was indexed by First Fixation Duration (FFD) and Initial Gaze Duration (IGD). IGD reflects early attentional engagement and is defined as the sum of the durations of all fixations occurring during the first entry into an AOI until the participant disengages attention from that AOI and shifts it to another AOI.
The third dependent variable was total attentional engagement. It was indexed by Dwell Time (DT), defined as the total duration of all fixations and saccades occurring within a given AOI.
The fourth dependent variable, attentional disengagement, was operationalized using the Latency of the First Disengagement Saccade. The latency of the first gaze shift from one AOI to another reflects the time required to initiate a saccade leading to a fixation on the opposite AOI. This measure does not include saccade duration.
