Study Shows People Aren't Staring At You, Even When You Think They Are

Have you ever been walking down the street and thought the people you passed were staring at you?

Researchers at University at Sydney say you have. And their research indicates those eyes you thought were checking you out probably weren't.

A paper published by the university's Vision Center focused on gaze perception - the ability to tell what a person is looking at - and how it affects what we think. 

Professor Colin Clifford from the university's School of Psychology says that "gaze perception doesn't only involve visual cues - our brains generate assumptions from our experiences and match them with what we see at a particular moment."

For his experiment Clifford and his team created images of faces and asked people to observe where the faces were looking.

"We made it difficult for the observers to see where the eyes were pointed so they would have to rely on their prior knowledge to judge the faces' direction of gaze," Clifford said in a statement. "It turns out that we're hard-wired to believe that others are staring at us, especially when we're uncertain.

"So gaze perception doesn't only involve visual cues - our brains generate assumptions from our experiences and match them with what we see at a particular moment."

The study shows that when people have limited visual cues, such as dark conditions, the brain takes over with what it "knows."

But it turns out just because the brain expects the gaze of others to fall on us doesn't mean it does.

People walking by aren't paying you nearly as much attention as you think they are, the study shows.

One speculation as to why our brains are biased to think that we are being observed is that it's a survival mechanism.

"Direct gaze can signal dominance or a threat, and if you perceive something as a threat, you would not want to miss it. So assuming that the other person is looking at you may simply be a safer strategy," Clifford said.

The research is published in a recent article in Current Biology.