Passersby look at what other people are looking at, but to a lesser degree than previously thought, according to a paper published in last week's PNAS. The paper discusses results based on detecting the direction of people's gazes in response to actors.
The really interesting idea in this article is the possibility suggested in the second experiment, of using people under observation as a 'sensor array' to detect suspicious behaviour second hand. People respond in predictable ways to suspicious behaviour - males look away, and females look towards it. Automating detection of people's gaze direction - surely easier than detecting suspicious behaviour directly - could be used to highlight behaviour that warrants further investigation in crowded places under surveillance.
Not sure about the ethics of leveraging the public's intelligence in this way - is it analogous to online monitoring of your anonymized behaviour by entities such as Google and Facebook?
Is machine surveillance less intrusive than and preferable to human surveillance - i.e. an algorithm picking out scenarios that warrant human investigation or intervention as opposed to a human operator watching everything?
The paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/19/7245.full.pdf+html
