The face communicates an impressive amount of visual information. We use it to identify its owner, how they are feeling and to help us understand what they are saying. Models of face processing have considered how we extract these kinds of meaning from the face but have ignored another important facial signal -eye gaze. However, recent neurophysiological and developmental studies have sparked some interest in the perception of gaze on the part of cognitive psychologists. In this article we begin by reviewing evidence suggesting that the eyes may constitute a special stimulus in at least two senses. First the structure of the eyes may have evolved to provide us with a particularly powerful signal to the direction in which someone is looking, and second, we may have evolved neural mechanisms devoted to their processing. As a result, gaze direction is analysed rapidly and automatically, and is able to trigger reflexive shifts of an observer's visual attention. Although the eyes are an undoubtedly important cue, understanding where another individual is directing their attention involves more than simply analysing their gaze direction. We go on to describe research with adult participants, children and non-human primates suggesting that other cues such as head orientation and pointing gestures make significant contributions to the computation of another's direction of attention. 3Since the early 1980's, considerable progress has been made in understanding the perceptual, cognitive and neurological processes involved in deriving various different kinds of meaning from the human face 1,2 . For example, we now have a much better understanding of the operations involved in recognising a familiar face, categorising the emotional expression carried by the face, and of how we are able to use the configuration of the lips, teeth and tongue to help us interpret what the owner of a face is saying to us. In their influential model of face processing Bruce and Young 3 proposed that these three types of meaning -identity, expression and facial speech -are extracted in parallel by functionally independent processing systems, a suggestion for which there is now converging empirical support 4 (though see Walker et al. 5 and Schweinberger & Soukup 6 for some complications).However, in common with other cognitive models of face processing, Bruce and Young's account neglected a number of additional facial movements that convey important meaning and make substantial contributions to interpersonal communication. One such signal -gaze -has been widely studied by social psychologists who have long known that it is used in functions such as regulating turn-taking in conversation, expressing intimacy, and exercising social control 7 . Despite this, interest in the perceptual and cognitive processes underlying the analysis of gaze and gaze direction has only emerged in recent years, perhaps stimulated by the work of Perrett 8,9 and Baron-Cohen 10,11 Perrett and his colleagues have proposed a model which is based on neurophysiolog...

We report three experiments that investigate whether faces are capable of capturing attention when in competition with other non-face objects. In Experiment 1a participants took longer to decide that an array of objects contained a butterfly target when a face appeared as one of the distracting items than when the face did not appear in the array. This irrelevant face effect was eliminated when the items in the arrays were inverted in Experiment 1b ruling out an explanation based on some low-level image-based properties of the faces. Experiment 2 replicated and extended the results of Experiment 1a. Irrelevant faces once again interfered with search for butterflies but, when the roles of faces and butterflies were reversed, irrelevant butterflies no longer interfered with search for faces. This suggests that the irrelevant face effect is unlikely to have been caused by the relative novelty of the faces or arises because butterflies and faces were the only animate items in the arrays. We conclude that these experiments offer evidence of a stimulus-driven capture of attention by faces.3

Summary1. The European badger (Meles meles) is implicated as a reservoir of Mycobacterium bovis (bovine TB) infection for cattle in Britain and Ireland. In the present study the spatio-temporal distribution of M. bovis infection was investigated. Analyses were carried out on data from a long-term epidemiological and ecological study of the dynamics of bovine TB in a wild population of badgers at Woodchester Park in south-west England. 2. During the 15 years of the capture±mark±recapture study (1982±96), 3316 trapping and post-mortem records were obtained from 1270 individual badgers. Annual prevalence of infection based on positive serological and bacterial tests varies between 10Á3% and 17Á7% of the population. 3. Infection was aggregated in social groups in the west of the study area, con®rm-ing the ®ndings of previous studies. However, temporal trends in disease were not synchronized amongst neighbouring groups, suggesting low rates of disease transfer between them. 4. There was signi®cant serial correlation in the disease status within groups over time, suggesting that infection persists for many years in some social groups. The presence of infectious adult female badgers in groups was associated with new infections, and provides further evidence for their importance in the maintenance of infection within groups. However, no statistically signi®cant correlations were detected between the demographic characteristics of social groups and group infection status. 5. The distribution of disease re¯ects stable persistent foci of infection in the badger population, with limited evidence of transfer between social groups. The accurate identi®cation of stable foci of infection would allow a range of management strategies for the control of bovine TB to be eciently targeted in such populations. However, the extent to which this pattern of infection is representative of low-density and disturbed badger populations is unknown.

The movement of 1763 badgers trapped between 36 social groups in Woodchester Park, Gloucestershire, over 18 years was analysed to determine the frequency and duration of moves, the factors associated with a predisposition to move and the spatial pattern of movements. Of those badgers whose capture history could be categorized, nearly half had moved. Of these, 73.1% were classi¢ed as`occasional movers', 22.1% as`permanent movers' and 4.8% as`frequent movers'. Most adult badgers that moved made occasional moves (78.8%, n 67). Cubs made all types of move including permanent moves (29%, n 10). Seventy per cent of females were non-movers compared with 37% of males. Badgers were signi¢cantly more likely to move to smaller groups, whereas male badgers were signi¢cantly more likely to move to groups with a greater proportion of females. The spatial pattern of movement di¡ered from the distribution of groups with bovine tuberculosis in the study area. However, temporal changes in movement were signi¢cantly related to the incidence of Mycobacterium bovis infection in the following year, indicating that as the movement of badgers between groups varies so does the incidence of bovine tuberculosis in the population. This ¢nding is of central importance in the formulation of badger control policy.

A number of studies using the dot-probe task now report the existence of attentional biases to angry faces in participants who rate highly on scales of anxiety; however, no equivalent bias has been observed in non-anxious populations, despite evidence to the contrary from studies using other tasks. One reason for this discrepancy may be that researchers using the dot-probe task have rarely investigated any effects which might emerge earlier than 500 ms following presentation of the threat-related faces.Accordingly, in the current study we presented pairs of face stimuli with emotional and neutral expressions and probed the allocation of attention to these stimuli for presentation times of 100ms and 500ms. Results showed that at 100ms there was an attentional bias towards the location of the relatively threatening stimulus (the angry face in angry/neutral pairs and the neutral face in neutral/happy pairs) and this pattern reversed by 500ms. Comparisons of RT scores with an appropriate baseline suggested that the early bias toward threatening faces may actually arise through inhibition of the relatively least threatening member of a face pair rather than through facilitation of, or vigilance towards, the more threatening stimulus. However the mechanisms governing the observed biases are interpreted, these data provide evidence that probing for the location of spatial attention at 500ms is not necessarily indicative of the initial allocation of attention between competing emotional facial stimuli.

Abstract. An investigation of what can be learned about representational processes in face recognition from the independent and combined effects of inverting and negating facial images is reported. In experiment 1, independent effects of inversion and negation were observed in a task of identifying famous faces. In experiments 2 through 4 the question of whether effects of negation were still obtained when effects due to the reversal of pigmentation in negative images were eliminated was examined. By the use of images of the 3-D surfaces of faces measured by laser, and displays as smooth surfaces devoid of pigmentation, only effects of inversion were obtained reliably, suggesting that the effects observed in experiment 1 arose largely through the inversion of pigmentation values in normal images of faces. The results of experiment 5 suggested that the difference was not due to the different task demands of experiments 2-4 compared with those of experiment 1. When normally pigmented face images were used in a task making similar demands to that of experiment 4, independent effects of inversion and negation were again observed. When a task of sex classification was used in experiments 6 and 7, clear effects of negation as well as inversion were observed on latencies, though not accuracies, of responding. The results are interpreted in terms of the information content of pigmentation relative to shape from shading in different face-classification tasks. The results also reinforce other recent evidence demonstrating the importance of image intensity as well as spatial layout of face 'features'.

We describe a set of face processing tests suitable for use with children aged from 4 to 10 years, which include tests of expression, lipreading and gaze processing as well as identification. The tests can be administered on paper or using a computer, and comparisons between the performance on computer- and paper-based versions suggest that format of administration makes little difference. We present results obtained from small samples of children at four different age groups (Study 1, computer-based tests), and larger samples at three age groups (Study 2, paper-based tests) from preschool to 10 years of age. The tests were found to be developmentally sensitive. There were quite strong correlations between performance on different tests of the same face processing ability (e.g. gaze processing), and generally rather weaker correlations between tests of different abilities

We report seven experiments that investigate the influence that head orientation exerts on the perception of eye-gaze direction. In each of these experiments, participants were asked to decide whether the eyes in a brief and masked presentation were looking directly at them or were averted. In each case, the eyes could be presented alone, or in the context of congruent or incongruent stimuli. In Experiment 1A, the congruent and incongruent stimuli were provided by the orientation of face features and head outline. Discrimination of gaze direction was found to be better when face and gaze were congruent than in both of the other conditions, an effect that was not eliminated by inversion of the stimuli (Experiment 1B). In Experiment 2A, the internal face features were removed, but the outline of the head profile was found to produce an identical pattern of effects on gaze discrimination, effects that were again insensitive to inversion (Experiment 2B) and which persisted when lateral displacement of the eyes was controlled (Experiment 2C). Finally, in Experiment 3A, nose angle was also found to influence participants' ability to discriminate direct gaze from averted gaze, but here the effectwas eliminated by inversion of the stimuli (Experiment 3B). We concluded that an image-based mechanism is responsible for the influence of head profile on gaze perception, whereas the analysis of nose angle involves the configural processing of face features