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Journal ArticleDOI

Gaze Perception Triggers Reflexive Visuospatial Orienting

01 Oct 1999-Visual Cognition (PSYCHOLOGY PRESS)-Vol. 6, Iss: 5, pp 509-540
TL;DR: In this paper, three studies manipulated the direction of gaze in a computerized face, which appeared centrally in a frontal view during a peripheral letter discrimination task, and found faster discrimination of peripheral target letters on the side the face gazed towards, even though the seen gaze did not predict target side, and despite participants being asked to ignore the face.
Abstract: This paper seeks to bring together two previously separate research traditions: research on spatial orienting within the visual cueing paradigm and research into social cognition, addressing our tendency to attend in the direction that another person looks. Cueing methodologies from mainstream attention research were adapted to test the automaticity of orienting in the direction of seen gaze. Three studies manipulated the direction of gaze in a computerized face, which appeared centrally in a frontal view during a peripheral letter-discrimination task. Experiments 1 and 2 found faster discrimination of peripheral target letters on the side the computerized face gazed towards, even though the seen gaze did not predict target side, and despite participants being asked to ignore the face. This suggests reflexive covert and/or overt orienting in the direction of seen gaze, arising even when the observer has no motivation to orient in this way. Experiment 3 found faster letter discrimination on the side the computerized face gazed towards even when participants knew that target letters were four times as likely on the opposite side. This suggests that orienting can arise in the direction of seen gaze even when counter to intentions. The experiments illustrate that methods from mainstream attention research can be usefully applied to social cognition, and that studies of spatial attention may profit from considering its social function.

Summary (3 min read)

Jump to: [INTRODUCTION][EXPERIMENT 1][METHODS][Results][Discussion][EXPERIMENT 2][Methods][EXPERIMENT 3] and [GENERAL DISCUSSION]

INTRODUCTION

  • This paper seeks to bring together two highly active areas of current research, which have previously been considered quite separately.
  • Variations on this basic cueing methodology have led to two important distinctions.
  • In particular, the authors sought to determine whether such orienting can arise reflexively, as found for the exogenous orienting observed within standard spatial cueing paradigms, in response to salient but spatially uninformative peripheral events.

EXPERIMENT 1

  • The authors first study investigated whether the direction of seen gaze, in a photographed face appearing on a computer screen, would induce "exogenous" spatial orienting, in the sense that has been previously defined for uninformative peripheral cues within traditional spatial cueing studies (e.g. Klein et al., 1992; Posner, 1980; Spence & Driver, 1994) .
  • The authors method involved aspects from both standard peripheral cueing techniques and from standard central-cueing techniques.
  • As with the cue events in previous central-cueing studies (which had typically used arrows pointing towards one or other side; e.g. Posner, 1980) , the face cue always appeared at the centre of the screen, at fixation.
  • Unlike traditional central-arrow cues, the direction in which the central eyes pointed was spatially uninformative about the probable location of the subsequent target, which was equally likely to appear on either side.

METHODS

  • The nine participants were all undergraduates at Cambridge University, with normal or corrected-to-normal vision, who were naive as to the purpose of the experiment.
  • Target letters were an upper-case L or T, each subtending 3°and centred 5°away from the centre of the screen on one or other side.
  • The exact time-course for the predicted cueing effect from gaze direction in the central face for the present study is somewhat hard to anticipate, however.

Results

  • The median RTs, and associated error rates, were derived for each of the six conditions (congruent/incongruent × 3 SOAs) for every participant.
  • Figure 4 shows the inter-participant means of median RTs for each condition, together with the mean error percentages in parentheses.
  • As before, the error rates were low and did not vary systematically with congruency condition or SOA, nor showed any signs of speed-accuracy trade-offs.

Discussion

  • The direction of gaze by the central face had a reliable effect on performance in the letter-discrimination task, even though the face was totally irrelevant to that task, and provided no information about where the target letter was likely to appear.
  • This could delay any subsequent shift of exogenous attention in the direction of the face's gaze.
  • That is, there was no evidence of the inhibition of return (IOR) phenomenon that can be found at longer SOAs after peripheral uninformative cues, whereby spatially congruent cues start to produce slower responses than spatially incongruent cues, at longer delays (see Posner & Cohen, 1984) .
  • Nevertheless, their usual cueing effect-namely an advantage for target letters on the side that the face gazed towards-was replicated once more at the 300-msec SOA.
  • The persistence of their usual cueing effect at the 300-msec S0A, producing an advantage for targets on the side that the face gazed towards, suggests that orienting in the direction of seen gaze can be an automatic process, in the strong sense of arising even when counter to a person's current intentions.

EXPERIMENT 2

  • The next study followed the method of Experiment 1 with just one exception.
  • Participants were now given considerable time to process the face, and to recover from its sudden onset at the centre of the screen, before any eye information was presented.
  • The authors expected to replicate the advantage for letter discrimination on congruent trials that was found in Experiment 1.
  • If the atypically slow time-course of that cueing effect had been in part due to attention being captured by the sudden appearance of a face at the centre of the screen, the authors expected that the effect should now become more robust at shorter SOAs, since the new procedure gave 522 FIG.
  • Then, 675 msec later, the face appeared, with eyes appearing "closed" due to the superimposed grey patches (Frame 2).

Methods

  • The methods were identical to Experiment 1, except for the insertion of a central face with eyes occluded for 900 msec at the start of each trial .
  • The eight new participants were Cambridge University undergraduates with normal vision.
  • This experiment was exactly like Experiment 2 except for a change in the probability of particular conditions.
  • Trials with the target letter appearing on the side that the face gazed away from were now four times as likely as trials where the face gazed towards the subsequent target .
  • Accordingly, the former type of trial is now referred to as "expected" rather than "incongruent", and likewise the previous "congruent" trials are now referred to as "unexpected".

EXPERIMENT 3

  • In the final study, the target was now four times as likely to appear on the side away from where the central face gazed . than to appear on the side that the face gazed towards .
  • Participants were reminded of these probabilities at the beginning of every block, and in any case had ample opportunity to discover the negative contingency between direction of gaze and likely target side for themselves, within the practice block and subsequent blocks.
  • The logic of this study is analogous to previous studies on the automaticity of exogenous spatial orienting in response to meaningless but salient peripheral cues.
  • If so, the authors would expect letter discrimination to be faster on the side that the central face gazes towards (at relatively early cue-target intervals, such as the 300-msec SOA) even though participants strongly expected the target to appear on the opposite side.
  • At longer cue-target intervals (e.g. the present 70 msec SOA), participants may have sufficient time to succeed in "pushing" their attention endogenously over to the expected side, as found at long delays after counter-informative peripheral cues (Spence & Driver, 1994) .

GENERAL DISCUSSION

  • The main theme of this paper is that the study of spatial orienting within mainstream attention research may be enriched by considering important social aspects of attention; and that, conversely, research on social cognition might usefully exploit some of the methodological and theoretical advances within mainstream attention research.
  • The authors examined whether orienting in the direction of seen gaze is automatic in two very specific senses.
  • It will be important to test whether the orienting that the authors have identified here will also pass the many additional criteria for automaticity that have been proposed in cognitive psychology.
  • The effects of their uninformative gaze-cue resemble those of traditional informative central cues more closely than those caused by uninformative peripheral cues.

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Gaze Perception Triggers Reflexive Visuospatial
Orienting
Jon Driver, Greg Davis, and Paola Ricciardelli
University College London, UK
Polly Kidd, Emma Maxwell, and Simon Baron-Cohen
University of Cambridge, UK
This paper seeks to bring together two previously separate research traditions: re-
search on spatial orienting within the visual cueing paradigm and research into
social cognition, addressing our tendency to attend in the direction that another
person looks. Cueing methodologies from mainstream attention research were
adapted to test the automaticity of orienting in the direction of seen gaze. Three
studies manipulated the direction of gaze in a computerized face, which appeared
centrally in a frontal view during a peripheral letter-discrimination task. Experi-
ments 1 and 2 found faster discrimination of peripheral target letters on the side
the computerized face gazed towards, even though the seen gaze did not predict
target side, and despite participants being asked to ignore the face. This suggests
reflexive covert and/or overt orienting in the direction of seen gaze, arising even
when the observer has no motivation to orient in this way. Experiment 3 found
faster letter discrimination on the side the computerized face gazed towards even
when participants knew that target letters were four times as likely on the oppo-
site side. This suggests that orienting can arise in the direction of seen gaze even
when counter to intentions. The experiments illustrate that methods from main-
stream attention research can be usefully applied to social cognition, and that
studies of spatial attention may profit from considering its social function.
Requests for reprints should be addressed to Jon Driver, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience,
University College London, Queen Square, London WC lN 3AR, UK. Email: j.driver@ucl.ac.uk
This work was supported by grants from the Human Frontiers Science Program and from the
ESRC (UK) to the first author. Our thanks to Vicki Bruce and Steve Langton for helpful discus-
sions of their own independent work on the same topic, and to Marylou Cheal and Ray Klein for
comments on the manuscript.
Ó
1999 Psychology Press Ltd
VISUAL COGNITION, 1999, 6 (5), 509540

INTRODUCTION
This paper seeks to bring together two highly active areas of current research,
which have previously been considered quite separately. One area concerns the
mechanisms of spatial attention. These have been studied intensively over the
last two decades, in many experiments in the spatial cueing tradition instigated
by Posner (1978) and others. The second area concerns the mechanisms under-
lying social cognition. This area has also undergone a tremendous expansion of
research activity in recent years (see, e.g. Baron-Cohen, 1995; Brothers; 1990;
Premack, 1988). To date, these two areas of research have pursued entirely sep-
arate agendas, with entirely different methodologies. Mainstream research on
attention has rarely considered orienting in response to stimuli of special social
significance, and studies of social attention have not exploited contemporary
advances in mainstream attention research. We suggest that these two separate
areas of research have a lot to gain from each other when considering certain
questions of general psychological interest. We seek to illustrate this for the
particular case of the mechanisms underlying shared attention”; that is, the
mechanisms which allow us to judge where other people are attending, and to
shift our own attention accordingly.
Brothers (1990) recently set a provocative new agenda for cognitive neuro-
science by proposing that the primate brain is primarily a social brain, contain-
ing specialized circuits dedicated to social perception and social action.
Mainstream attention research has overlooked this emphasis on social func-
tion. Brothers’ proposal was based upon several lines of argument. First, from
an evolutionary perspective, the ability to perceive social relations (e.g. rank, or
the current focus of attention of conspecifics) seems highly adaptive. It should
allow an animal to benefit maximally from the many potential advantages of a
social existence. Second, from a neuropsychological perspective, particular
forms of brain damage (such as lesions to the orbitofrontal cortex or to the
amygdala; Butter & Snyder, 1972; Kling & Brothers, 1992) are already known
to lead to quite specific abnormalities in social behaviour, as classically illus-
trated by the Kluver-Bucy syndrome in monkeys (Kluver & Bucy, 1938) and
by the human case of Phineas Gage (see Damasio, 1995). Third, more recent
evidence from neuroscience, using single-cell recording techniques, has
revealed the existence of neurons that respond selectively to particular classes
of social stimuli. These include faces, hands, eyes and even the apparent direc-
tion of attention in seen conspecifics (Brothers, 1995; Bruce, Desimone, &
Gross, 1981; Perrett, Rolls, & Cann, 1982; Perrett et al., 1990; Perrett & Emery,
1994).
Baron-Cohen (1994, 1995) recently proposed that the brain contains several
modules each specialized for different aspects of social existence. Of particular
relevance for this paper, he proposed that one such module serves as an
“eye-direction detector”, identifying the presence of eyes, their direction of
510
DRIVER ET AL.

gaze and any direct eye-contact. There is substantial evidence for a high sensi-
tivity to being looked at across a wide range of species, from reptiles through to
primates (Blest, 1957; Burghardt, 1990; Chance, 1967; Ristau, 1990; Scaife,
1976). Human infants spend more time looking at the eyes than at other regions
of a face from as early as 2 months of age (Maurer, 1985). In addition to the
eye-direction detector, Baron-Cohen also suggested the existence of a “shared
attention mechanism which he argued may be specific to humans or higher
primates. This hypothetical mechanism is concerned with whether the self and
another agent are both attending to the same object or event, thus allowing for
what Bruner (1983) terms “joint attention.
By 14–18 months of age, normal human infants all exhibit joint attention, by
means of the protodeclarative pointing gesture (both reception and production
thereof), and also by gaze-following (Bates et al., 1979; Bruner, 1983; Scaife
& Bruner, 1975). The exception to this universal development comes
from children with the neuropsychiatric condition of autism (Baron-Cohen,
1989; Baron-Cohen, Allen, & Gilberg, 1992; Baron-Cohen et al., 1996a, b).
Baron-Cohen (1995) took the characteristic ontogenesis of shared attention,
and its selective impairment in autism, as preliminary evidence for a special-
ized module for shared attention.
In the present paper, we apply a further traditional criterion for modularity
(see Fodor, 1983) to the specific case of shared attention in response to seen
gaze; namely, its possible automaticity of operation in adult humans. The clas-
sic example of shared attention arises when people orient in the direction of
another’s gaze (Bruner, 1983; Butterworth, 1991). Here we test whether such
orienting arises automatically”, in two specific senses. First, does such shared
attention arise even when a person has no particular intention to follow the seen
gaze? Second, is shared attention as a consequence of gaze perception auto-
matic in the stronger sense of arising even when one has the express intention of
preventing oneself from orienting in the direction of seen gaze? We begin with
a brief review of what is currently known about gaze perception, and the
shared-attention behaviour that it can trigger.
Many species gaze towards regions of the environment that are currently of
particular interest to them, in order to sample these regions with their most sen-
sitive visual receptors. The direction in which other animals or people look can
therefore convey considerable information to an observer, by signalling the
observed party’s current interests. If that party suddenly looks in a specific
direction away from the observer, this might signal the location of possible
food, of possible danger, of an attractive conspecific, or of a threatening animal
(see Byrne & Whiten, 1991; Menzel & Halperin, 1975). If the other party sud-
denly looks towards the observer, this may be an early warning that a sudden
attack or some other important interaction is imminent. Indeed, direct gaze is
treated as threatening by many species, as shown when captive monkeys dis-
play fear responses for gaze directed towards them (e.g. Mendelsohn, Haith, &
VISUAL ORIENTING TRIGGERED BY GAZE PERCEPTION
511

Goldman-Rakic, 1982; Perrett & Mistlin, 1990), or when human subjects react
similarly to prolonged gaze from a stranger (e.g. Argyle & Cook, 1976). Of
course, mutual gaze can also signal attraction instead of threat, as between lov-
ers (e.g. Rubin, 1970).
As noted earlier, young human infants look more at the eyes than elsewhere
in faces (Maurer, 1985). They are also demonstrably sensitive to the direction
of seen gaze from around 4 months (Papousek & Papousek, 1979; Samuels,
1985; Vecera & Johnson, 1995), often smiling when gazed at (Wolff, 1963).
Moreover, the “peekabo game is a universal social routine with young infants
(Bruner, 1983), which involves concealing and then revealing the eyes repeat-
edly. Adult humans are highly sensitive to the gaze direction of other people, as
shown by several psychophysical studies (e.g. Anstis, Mayhew, & Morley,
1969; Gibson & Pick, 1962; Watt, 1992). This high sensitivity is lost after brain
injury in some prosopagnosic patients (Campbell et al., 1990). Similarly, the
sensitivity of macaque monkeys to gaze direction is impaired following lesions
to the superior temporal sulcus, a cortical region where single cells have been
found to exhibit fine-tuning for the direction of gaze in a seen face (Perrett &
Mistlin, 1990).
Gaze direction is used to regulate various social interactions in humans and
other primates, such as dominance confrontations and grooming (Chance,
1967; Van Hooff, 1962), or turn-taking in communication. Bruner (1983) has
argued extensively that gaze interactions between adults and preverbal infants
form an essential precursor to initial language acquisition. Baldwin (1991)
showed that gaze perception plays a role in vocabulary acquisition by toddlers,
since the direction in which a speaker looks can indicate the intended referent of
unfamiliar words. Based on such findings, Baron-Cohen (1995) has argued that
gaze perception forms an essential component of the ability to infer other peo-
ple’s mental states, especially their current focus of attention, their interest and
their goals.
Detecting the direction of gaze can lead to joint attention even in infants.
Scaife and Bruner (1975), Butterworth (1991) and others have videotaped
infants of various ages as they face their mothers, who suddenly divert gaze to
look at a particular object in the room. Even at 4 months of age, infants make
some eye-movements in the corresponding direction, although there is a devel-
opmental progression in their ability then to fixate upon exactly the same object
as the mother with just a single saccade (see Corkum & Moore, 1994; Hood,
Willen, & Driver, 1998). Like other aspects of joint attention, the development
of such gaze-following is strikingly abnormal in autism (Baron-Cohen, 1989;
Baron-Cohen et al., 1996a; Leekham et al., in press).
Given all this evidence for the importance of gaze perception in determining
the direction of normal attention, and its apparent involvement in various
pathologies affecting attention, it is very striking that the topic goes quite
unmentioned in the extensive literature on visuospatial orienting, within
512
DRIVER ET AL.

mainstream attention research on adult humans (for reviews, see Klein,
Kingstone, & Pontefract 1992; Posner, 1980; Spence & Driver, 1994). Such
research has entirely overlooked Brothers’ maxim that the human brain is
largely a social brain, and has focused instead on purely asocial situations to
date. Experiments in this tradition have typically examined reflexive orienting
in response to meaningless but salient events (e.g. abrupt sounds or sudden
flashes), or deliberate orienting in response to entirely arbitrary instructions
(e.g. expect a target on the left). Such studies have not been concerned with ori-
enting in response to events of particular ecological or social significance, such
as sudden changes in the direction of gaze by a conspecific, which may induce
shared attention.
Nevertheless, this mainstream orienting literature has successfully devel-
oped several powerful “cueing methods for measuring any spatial orienting
that may arise, and for examining its exact nature. The present paper therefore
adapts these cueing methods to study the specific case of orienting by adult
humans in response to the direction of seen gaze. Our aims in so doing were
two-fold: first, to use the established cueing methods to gain further insights
into the mechanisms by which gaze perception directs orienting; and, second,
to place more social questions about spatial orienting onto the agenda of main-
stream attention research, and thus into the realm of the extensive spatial cueing
literature.
The cueing method for studying spatial orienting was popularized by Posner
(1978, 1980) and his colleagues. In a prototypical study, adult subjects are
asked to detect visual targets, which may appear on either side of fixation. Their
attention can be cued to one side or another before the target appears (e.g. by a
brief but uninformative flash on that side, or merely by the instruction that tar-
gets are most likely on that side). The robust finding of many such studies is that
target detection is often more rapid on the cued side, owing to orienting in that
direction.
Variations on this basic cueing methodology have led to two important dis-
tinctions. The first is that between “overt” orienting and “covert” orienting.
Overt orienting refers to shifts in receptors, such as eye-movements towards the
cued side, which will obviously enhance target detection on that side owing to
the greater sensitivity of foveal receptors. However, even when no such overt
orienting is permitted, target detection can still be faster on the cued side than
on the uncued side; this is usually attributed to internal, covert shifts of atten-
tion in the cued direction (e.g. Posner, 1978, 1980). Although the overt/covert
distinction can be important for a full understanding of the underlying mecha-
nisms responsible for any cueing effect, it is tangential to our main concerns
here. Our central goal was to examine the automaticity of any orienting in
response to seen gaze. For this purpose, overt and covert orienting are both of
interest, and so we had no reason to exclude overt orienting from our experi-
ment by preventing or monitoring eye-movements by the participant.
VISUAL ORIENTING TRIGGERED BY GAZE PERCEPTION
513

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Cites background from "Gaze Perception Triggers Reflexive ..."

  • ...Shifting attention in response to perceived gaze direction apparently is reflexive, occurring even when subjects are told that the direction of perceived gaze is irrelevant (Driver et al 1999; Friesen and Kingstone 1998; Hietanen 1999; Langton and Bruce 1999)....

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Abstract: 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.

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"Gaze Perception Triggers Reflexive ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Experiments 1 and 2 found faster discrimination of peripheral target letters on the side the computerized face gazed towards, even though the seen gaze did not predict target side, and despite participants being asked to ignore the face....

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  • ...See text for details of the sequence of events on each trial. a. b. rapidly as possible on each trial whether the letter was a T or an L, a discrimination which has previously been held to require focused visual attention (e.g. Sagi & Julesz, 1985; Treisman & Gelade, 1980)....

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TL;DR: The authors argued that rational decisions are not the product of logic alone - they require the support of emotion and feeling, drawing on his experience with neurological patients affected with brain damage, Dr Damasio showed how absence of emotions and feelings can break down rationality.
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"Gaze Perception Triggers Reflexive ..." refers background or methods in this paper

  • ...For instance, our data are entirely silent on the issue of whether gaze-following reflects innately specified mechanisms, as Fodor (1983) suggested for his proposed modules, or instead results from extensive social experience....

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  • ...In the present paper, we apply a further traditional criterion for modularity (see Fodor, 1983 ) to the specific case of shared attention in response to seen gaze; namely, its possible automaticity of operation in adult humans....

    [...]

  • ...Specialized modules have several defining characteristics according to Fodor (1983) , as discussed later....

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  • ...Experiment 3); independent of set-size; unconscious; innate; highly practised; informationally encapsulated; cognitively impenetrable; modularized; and dependent on dedicated neural systems (Bargh, 1992; Carr, 1992; Fodor, 1983; Logan, 1992; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977)....

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Frequently Asked Questions (10)
Q1. What are the contributions in "Gaze perception triggers reflexive visuospatial orienting" ?

This paper seeks to bring together two previously separate research traditions: research on spatial orienting within the visual cueing paradigm and research into social cognition, addressing their tendency to attend in the direction that another person looks. This suggests reflexive covert and/or overt orienting in the direction of seen gaze, arising even when the observer has no motivation to orient in this way. This suggests that orienting can arise in the direction of seen gaze even when counter to intentions. 

These results have several implications for mainstream attention research, for the study of social cognition and for future attempts to bring these two areas together in a fruitful manner. However, it remains for future research to determine whether the orienting that the authors have documented reflects specialized modules with all the other characteristics that Fodor first proposed. Further studies with this method may reveal orienting in response to seen gaze by even younger babies. However, their gaze-cues differed in so many respects from standard central or peripheral cues ( e. g. not only in their physical size and eccentricity, but also in the information that must be encoded to determine which side they should benefit ), that further work would be needed for any full understanding of the basis for these similarities and dissimilarities. 

Baldwin (1991) showed that gaze perception plays a role in vocabulary acquisition by toddlers, since the direction in which a speaker looks can indicate the intended referent of unfamiliar words. 

after a variable delay depending on cue–target SOA, the target letter appeared on one side (Frame 4).participants 900 msec to recover from the sudden onset of the central face, before the onset of the eyes. 

As discussed earlier, Baron-Cohen (1995) has recently proposed that orienting in response to seen gaze is automatic, in the particular sense of being driven by a specialized Fodorian module. 

by 700-msec after presentation of the cue, the cueing effect was significantly reduced (and, indeed, was reversed in sign) when participants could develop the expectancy that the target was most likely to appear on the side that the face gazed away from (i.e. in Experiment 3 as compared with Experiment 2). 

Many authors (e.g. Humphrey, 1976) have suggested that their ability to attend covertly in different directions may have evolved partly to mask their intentions and interests from others, who may be monitoring their gaze direction. 

It seems more likely to us that covert attention initially shifted in the direction of seen gaze in this study, rather than overt attention, since it is quite straightforward to demonstrate in everyday life that adults can suppress overt saccades in the direction of seen gaze, at will. 

Overt orienting refers to shifts in receptors, such as eye-movements towards the cued side, which will obviously enhance target detection on that side owing to the greater sensitivity of foveal receptors. 

Covert intentional mechanisms may allow us to “look” automatically where someone else is gazing, while disguising this fact from them and any other parties.