Normal subjects were presented with a simple line drawing of a face looking left, right, or straight ahead. A target letter F or T then appeared to the left or the right of the face. All subjects participated in target detection, localization, and identification response conditions. Although subjects were told that the line drawing's gaze direction (the cue) did not predict where the target would occur, response time in all three conditions was reliably faster when gaze was toward versus away from the target. This study provides evidence for covert, reflexive orienting to peripheral locations in response to uninformative gaze shifts presented at fixation. The implications for theories of social attention and visual orienting are discussed, and the brain mechanisms that may underlie this phenomenon are considered.A moment's introspection reveals that in everyday life, gaze shifts can provide a rich and complex source of social information. For instance, at a loud party one can communicate the desire to leave by simply "catching" a friend's eye and then looking toward the door. The use of gaze shift as a social cue would, ofcourse, have had many evolutionary advantages as well. For example, a sudden shift in gaze could signal the occurrence of crucial events in the environment, such as the approach of a predator or the presence of a food source, Given the wealth of information that gaze shifts can provide, it is not surprising to discover that lesion and single-cell recording studies with nonhuman primates indicate that specific brain areas are specialized for the processing of gaze information. For instance, in singlecell recording experiments with the macaque monkey, Perrett and his colleagues have found specific cells in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) that respond to particular orientations of both head and gaze (Perrett et aI., 1985). Similarly, Campbell, Heywood, Cowey, Regard, and Landis (1990) have found that STS lesions in the rhesus monkey impair gaze direction discrimination.Research with human infants suggests that the development of these specialized brain areas begins to affect behavior at a very young age. As early as 2 to 3 months, babies look preferentially at the eyes of a schematic face (Maurer, 1985), and by 3 months they are also able to discriminate changes in an adult's eye direction (Hains & Muir, 1996). In the second half of their 1st year, infants begin to show the ability to look in the same general direction as an adult's gaze and head tum. And by the age of 12 months, infants reliably look to where someone else is looking, regardless ofwhether a shift in gaze is accompanied by a head tum (Corkum & Moore, 1995; but see a recent study by Hood, Willen, & Driver, 1998, suggesting that infants as young as 10 weeks old orient to gaze shifts alone).The goal of the present study was to explore whether gaze shifts would produce shifts of attention in adults. Our manipulation was very simple, yet, as we will show, very powerful. We modified the standard Posner cuing paradigm (Posner, 1978(Po...

The pursuit of social rank is a recurrent and pervasive challenge faced by individuals in all human societies. Yet, the precise means through which individuals compete for social standing remains unclear. In 2 studies, we investigated the impact of 2 fundamental strategies-Dominance (the use of force and intimidation to induce fear) and Prestige (the sharing of expertise or know-how to gain respect)-on the attainment of social rank, which we conceptualized as the acquisition of (a) perceived influence over others (Study 1), (b) actual influence over others' behaviors (Study 1), and (c) others' visual attention (Study 2). Study 1 examined the process of hierarchy formation among a group of previously unacquainted individuals, who provided round-robin judgments of each other after completing a group task. Results indicated that the adoption of either a Dominance or Prestige strategy promoted perceptions of greater influence, by both group members and outside observers, and higher levels of actual influence, based on a behavioral measure. These effects were not driven by popularity; in fact, those who adopted a Prestige strategy were viewed as likable, whereas those who adopted a Dominance strategy were not well liked. In Study 2, participants viewed brief video clips of group interactions from Study 1 while their gaze was monitored with an eye tracker. Dominant and Prestigious targets each received greater visual attention than targets low on either dimension. Together, these findings demonstrate that Dominance and Prestige are distinct yet viable strategies for ascending the social hierarchy, consistent with evolutionary theory.

The authors used counterpredictive cues to examine reflexive and volitional orienting to eyes and arrows. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of eyes with a novel design that allowed for a comparison of gazed-at (cued) target locations and likely (predicted) target locations against baseline locations that were not cued and not predicted. Attention shifted reflexively to the cued location and volitionally to the predicted location, and these 2 forms of orienting overlapped in time. Experiment 2 discovered that another well-learned directional stimulus, an arrow, produced a different effect: Attention was shifted only volitionally to the predicted location. The authors suggest that because there is a neural architecture specialized for processing eyes, gaze-triggered attention is more strongly reflexive than orienting to arrows.

Recent behavioral data have shown that central nonpredictive gaze direction triggers reflexive shifts of attention toward the gazed-at location (e.g., Friesen & Kingstone, 1998). Friesen and Kingstone suggested that this reflexive orienting effect is unique to biologically relevant stimuli. Three experiments were conducted to test this proposal by comparing the attentional orienting produced by nonpredictive gaze cues (biologically relevant) with the attentional orienting produced by nonpredictive arrow cues (biologicallyirrelevant).Both types of cues produced reflexiveorienting in adults (Experiment 1)and preschoolers (Experiment 2), suggesting that gaze cues are not special

How do people distribute their visual attention in the natural environment? We and our colleagues have usually addressed this question by showing pictures, photographs or videos of natural scenes under controlled conditions and recording participants' eye movements as they view them. In the present study, we investigated whether people distribute their gaze in the same way when they are immersed and moving in the world compared to when they view video clips taken from the perspective of a walker. Participants wore a mobile eye tracker while walking to buy a coffee, a trip that required a short walk outdoors through the university campus. They subsequently watched first-person videos of the walk in the lab. Our results focused on where people directed their eyes and their head, what objects were gazed at and when attention-grabbing items were selected. Eye movements were more centralised in the real world, and locations around the horizon were selected with head movements. Other pedestrians, the path, and objects in the distance were looked at often in both the lab and the real world. However, there were some subtle differences in how and when these items were selected. For example, pedestrians close to the walker were fixated more often when viewed on video than in the real world. These results provide a crucial test of the relationship between real behaviour and eye movements measured in the lab.

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Social attention, or how spatial attention is allocated to biologically relevant stimuli, has typically been studied using simplistic paradigms that do not provide any opportunity for social interaction. To study social attention in a complex setting that affords social interaction, we measured participants' looking behavior as they were sitting in a waiting room, either in the presence of a confederate posing as another research participant, or in the presence of a videotape of the same confederate. Thus, the potential for social interaction existed only when the confederate was physically present. Although participants frequently looked at the videotaped confederate, they seldom turned toward or looked at the live confederate. Ratings of participants' social skills correlated with head turns to the live, but not videotaped, confederate. Our results demonstrate the importance of studying social attention within a social context, and suggest that the mere opportunity for social interaction can alter social attention.eye movements | overt visual attention | visual cognition | autism

Understanding the factors underlying variation in attentional state is critical in a number of domains. Here, we investigate the relation between time on task and mind wandering (i.e., a state of decoupled attention) in the context of a lecture. Lectures are the primary means of knowledge transmission in post secondary education rendering an understanding of attentional variations in lectures a pressing practical concern. We report two experiments wherein participants watched a video recorded lecture either alone (Experiment 1) or in a classroom context (Experiment 2). Participants responded to mind wandering probes at various times in the lecture in an effort to track variations in mind wandering over time. In addition, following the lecture, memory for the lecture material was tested. Results demonstrate that in a lecture mind wandering increases with time on task and memory for the lecture material decreases. In addition, there was a significant relation between mind wandering and memory for lecture material. Theoretical and practical applications of the present results are discussed.