Visual Attentional Orienting by Eye Gaze: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Gaze-Cueing Effect

Abstract

Given limitations in the amount of visual information that a person can simultaneously process through to conscious perception, selective visual attention is necessary. Visual signals in the environment aid this selection process by triggering reflexive shifts of covert attention to locations of potential importance. One such signal appears to be others’ eye gaze. Indeed, a gaze-cueing effect, whereby healthy adults respond faster to targets presented at locations cued rather than miscued by eye gaze, has been consistently observed in the empirical literature. Critically though, the influences of task and cue features on this effect are not well understood. To address this gap, we report a meta-analytic integration of 423 gaze-cueing effects using a multi-level approach. A gaze-cueing effect emerged across all levels of all assessed task and cue features, indicating that others’ eye gaze reliably directs observers’ attention. We found that the magnitude of the gaze-cueing effect was moderated by whether direct gaze cues preceded directional gaze cues or not; the cue-target Stimulus Onset Asynchrony, whether participants had to detect, localize, or categorize targets; and the cue’s facial expression. Whether or not the gaze cue remained on screen after the target appeared, and whether schematic faces, computer-generated faces, or images of real faces were used as cues, did not appear to reliably function as moderators. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed, particularly in relation to the social attention system.

Uncovering the Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying the Gaze Cueing Effect

“…Specifically, our findings suggest that for most people, gaze cues tended to elicit an early, reflexive shift of attention to the gazed at location which resulted in a response time benefit when the target appeared at the gazed-at location and a response time orienting cost when the target appeared at the gazed-away from location. This is consistent with previous characterizations of the gaze cueing effect as a covert, reflexive shift of attention to the gazed at location (e.g., Friesen & Kingstone, 1998;Frischen et al, 2007;McKay et al, 2021;McKay et al, 2022;Sato et al, 2007).…”

“…We ignored the distinction between SOA in our analyses to keep consistency across data sets. This is reasonable given recent meta-analytic findings that the magnitude of the gaze cueing effect is equivalent across these SOAs (McKay et al, 2021).…”

“…Eyes reveal rich social information about the intentions, emotional states, and desires of others (Stephenson et al, 2021). Therefore, being attentive to the direction of other people's eye gaze is an important social-cognitive capacity, reflected by a robust tendency for people to respond faster to locations gazed-at by others compared to locations gazed away from by others (Frischen et al, 2007;McKay et al, 2021). This tendency is referred to as the gaze cueing effect (as initially demonstrated in Driver et al, 1999;Friesen & Kingstone, 1998).…”

“…This interest has been reflected in the published literature, with the gaze cueing effect being studied widely and across a range of contexts. A recent meta-analysis of more than 400 gaze cueing effects found that it is remarkably robust, emerging irrespective of a number of task-and cue-feature parameters in healthy adults (see McKay et al, 2021).…”

“…While there are several types of cueing paradigms commonly used in the literature such as categorization, detection, and localization paradigms, in this study we only used localization cueing paradigms in order to facilitate comparison across data sets. These tasks are also the most commonly used in healthy adult populations, according to a recent meta analysis that found almost half of the gaze cueing effects in the published literature are derived from localization paradigms (McKay et al, 2021). In the following paragraphs we briefly describe each experiment that we extracted data from, but refer the reader to the original studies for more information on the original study methods.…”