What boosts attention orienting in response to other people's gaze direction?

Bukowski, Henryk [UCL] Hietanen, Jari K. [Human Information Processing Laboratory, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tampere] Samson, Dana [UCL]

Every day we experience our attention to be directed towards an object that someone is looking at, even when the object and the person are perceived simultaneously. This is usually explained by the effect of the observed gaze direction on attention. Interestingly, there is so far no experimental finding showing a gaze cueing effect in a classic attentional gaze cueing paradigm when the cue and the target are presented simultaneously (stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 0 ms). However, such gaze cueing effect has been found at a SOA of 0 ms in the context of a visual perspective-taking paradigm. The current study examines the origin of the discrepancy across the classic gaze cueing and the visual perspective-taking paradigms. The results show that the gaze cueing effect was not caused by a difference in visual salience (Experiment 1) or task difficulty (Experiment 2) but that it was caused by how attention is deployed in response to task instructions (Experiment 3). The results are discussed in relation to the role of attentional mechanisms in social perception.