Orienting to the direction of another persons gaze is pivotal in social development.
As well as alerting one to peripheral events, this behaviour helps the observer engage in 'Joint Attention', which can facilitate the representation of another person's mental state. The effect of observing averted gaze cues on visuospatial
attention was investigated in a series of experiments. Replicating prior work, taskirrelevant gaze and arrow cues resulted in reaction time advantages to targets at cued locations, compared with targets at uncued locations. Female participants revealed consistently larger cueing effects than male participants did, for gaze and arrow cues (Experiments 1 to 5). Further, gaze-cueing magnitude was inversely correlated with score on the autism-spectrum quotient (AQ; Baron-Cohen et al. 2001). That is, participants with few autistic-like traits were cued more by other people's gaze.
Furthennore, peripheral cues revealed no gender differences (Experiments 6 and 7), suggesting that the sex difference is unique to attention shifts evoked via central cues. Low scorers on the AQ were also found to display larger gaze and arrowcueing effects when the target appeared on a coherent object, compared with scrambled displays, while high AQ participants displayed the opposite trend (Experiments 8 and 9). This was interpreted as evidence for differences in
local/global processing bias, as a function of position along the autism spectrum. A final issue of the integration of gaze and head orientation was addressed. Head orientation was manipulated by rotating the face 90 degrees in the picture plane. The eyes in the face looked up or down, yet cueing was found to the left or right, as if the head had been presented upright (Experiments 11 to 13). The findings of these studies have implications for the study of attention and social interactions, and for the role of individual processing style in such cueing effects.